


Just Another Tuesday

by Tomboy13



Series: Tomboy’s AgentCorp stories [2]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Blood and Gore, F/F, Violence, Zombies, sort of zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2018-01-08
Packaged: 2019-02-14 09:03:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 30,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13004376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tomboy13/pseuds/Tomboy13
Summary: An infection breaks loose at L Corp, leaving Lena and her colleagues stranded at the top of the building with 31 floors of zombie-like creatures between them and the only possible exit.I do not own the characters but I do own my own grammatical errors.





	1. Chapter 1

The heaving against the door was getting louder, and despite it being reinforced to be all but bullet proof, Lena was 99.9% sure that it wasn't going to hold up much longer to the sheer barrage of bodies wedging against it.

Mentally, she was trying to calculate exactly how many people could fit in the antechamber which housed the waiting area and her secretaries' desk. Maybe 80, if she excluded the corridors that branched off to the other senior execs’ offices. That was a lot of force to be exerted against 1 door. She bit her lip, and glanced over at the 3 other women.

Amy, her secretary, looked like she was going to throw up. She kept scrunching her red ponytail up in her right hand while the left clutched her stomach. Sue, her Executive Assistant was sobbing gently, and Lindsey, the usually stern Head of the Medical Sciences department was looking at her boss like she had to have the answer. Lindsey was at least twice Lena’s age, and despite being 34, the Luthor felt painfully hard done by that the role of “capable adult” had somehow fallen to her.

The room was lit by the glow of strip lighting, although it couldn't be more than 1 in the afternoon. She’d put the shutters down when one of those…people had fallen onto the balcony. It terrified her, the idea that the mob of infected had already permeated from the basement labs to the roof. Every now and then the heavy lead lined shutters would rattle, suggesting that there were more than a few of them out there now. Was this still confined to L Corp or were those things right now spilling out into the streets, spreading this disease, whatever it was, in an exponential flood? How many of her employees had become casualties? 

For a sky scraper, Lena knew that the L Corp head office building was a warren, full of sealed laboratories and meeting rooms and service corridors that were practically hidden. There was a small chance that only the people down in the labs when this started had been compromised, and that they were the ones now battering to get in.

She was already assuming that this had started within the building itself. One of Lex’s experiments that an enthusiastic scientist had covertly continued of their own accord, maybe.

Although it wasn't one of her prized doctors or one of the army of lab technicians that she’d found trying to attack Amy less than an hour before. It had been David, one of the more friendly security guards. He’d always insisted on calling Lena ‘Miss Luthor’, no matter how many times she asked him to call her by her first name. She’d met him on the day the company moved to National City, and he’d been the first person in months to look genuinely happy to see her.

Today though, she'd been going over the irregularities in the contract spend for the medical division, trying to gauge whether Lindsey was complicit or incompetent, using as ever Sue as her trusted second pair of eyes, when she’d heard the commotion from outside.

She would have preferred it if panicked screaming in the vicinity of her office was a less regular occurrence, but there was something else to this. An edge, an edge not of anger or alarm, but of genuine fear. 

Slowly, Lena had pushed herself out of her desk, and without a glance at the other women in the room, crossed to the door. When she’d opened it, it took a second to make any kind of sense.

There was Amy, behind her desk where she should have been, except now she wasn't really, she was half over it and a man who was ashen pale, with a smear of blood down the side of his face, was pulling her accross by her forearm. The young woman's skin was going white with how tight his grip was, and her other hand was trying to keep him at bay where he was angling his top half towards her.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?” Lena asked, mustering up all the authority that she didn't feel into her tone. The man turned to her then, teeth bared, and she saw it was David. 

“David what's happened?”

The older man still had hold of the secretaries arm, and she was still tugging, but he seemed frozen in place. Lena approached him cautiously.

“David where did the blood come from? Are you hurt?” She reached her hand out tentatively in reassurance, edging it closer to his shoulder where she could now see a rip in the navy blue uniform that was oozing blood. 

She was inches away, when 3 things happened in very quick succession. The elevator a few metres away dinged; David’s face changed into a hideous snarl; and Amy, who Lena had known for only 3 months and had secretly begun to consider as not up to the job, hit the rabid security guard very hard with the fire extinguisher. He crumpled like paper in front of Lena’s horrified face, and then she was being dragged into her office as people began to stumble and fall through the elevator doors.

As the door was slammed, Lena could just see the same furious expression on their faces. Furious, and hungry.

That was an hour ago.

They'd heard more shouting along the corridor as the other high levels and their admin staff had come out to see what the commotion was for, or, and when they'd realised this the four women had cringed, had had the doors to their less secure offices smashed in.

Trying to keep panic at bay, Lena had slipped into leadership mode and spent some time giving the other women jobs to do: filling up all the glasses and cups from the sink; working out how much food they had; what could they use for weapons; were the phones working? 

The answer to the last question had been no, and that had cut everyone's spirits in half. Even the cell phone signal seemed to have dropped out, and as time went on, all of their minds had begun to stray to the loved ones outside the building. 

Alex was out there, no doubt launching into full hero mode with her DEO team and Kara; her babies, her lovely little girls were across town in the suburbs with the child minder that Sam had recommended. It was a small relief that Sam herself had taken a much needed holiday with Ruby; they were probably blissfully happy on a sun drenched Mexican beach right now. 

If she hadn't been in the grips of such an extreme horror, it might have felt odd that she was thinking about her friend's vacation while homicidal maniacs were hammering on the door outside, but she would rather think of just about anything than the bubbling terror that this disease, that seemed to have started in her own damn labs, might have spilled out to the pretty detatched house where her children would be just finishing their lunch. Vera was 3 going on 42 but she was good with her food; she got that from her auntie Kara, Alex liked to joke. Little Edith was barely 6 months old, and so fussy that Lena knew she could only have got that from the Luthor side, no matter that the neither of her daughters shared her DNA.

“What's the plan then, boss?” Sue was wiping her eyes on the crisp sleeve of her white shirt, tugging to loosen the royal blue tie around her neck. Sue had been hired after Jess left to take over the Paris branch; a butch woman in her mid-twenties, her sharp suits and buzz cut gave off the impression that she could take on the world. Seeing her with eyes red from crying was uniquely disconcerting.

“Try the phones again. Try the internet connection. The powers still up, there is no reason that they shouldn't be working.” Lena pulled out her phone: still no signal. The others confirmed the same. Neither her laptop nor tablet had internet signal, the wifi was down - It was like they'd been cut off.

“Well then, we just sit it out. I designed this office to withstand an army. We’ve got food and water to last a couple of days if we’re careful. We sit it out and wait for the cavalry.”

Sue smiled shakily. “Sounds like a plan.”

Lindsey was staring, mouth open like a fish. “It sure is a plan." she said eventually.

“Do you have a better one?” Lena asked with no bite in her voice.

Lindsey thought for a moment, before shaking her head. “Unless you have a time machine tucked away in the safe, I think that's the only plan we have.”

It was 2 hours later when the desk phone started ringing.

The noises at the door had been lessening, and Amy had thought she’d heard the door to the fire escape stairs slam shut, but she couldn't be sure. None of them felt inclined to go check; the desperate banging might have eased off, but they'd been replaced with a troubling scratching sound, like finger nails clawing at the wood.

At the sound of the phone, the clawing turned once again to a constant droning thump, and the shutters clanged against the triple glazed windows.

Lena snatched the phone up before it got to the third ring. “Hello? Hello?”

“Lena? Oh thank Rao that's you.” A familiar voice on the other end said.

“Kara, Jesus Kara what the fuck is happening? Where are you, are you safe?”

“I'm outside Lena. I'm safe, so is Alex and the girls, don't worry about us.”

“Oh thank god.” Tears were welling up in her eyes but she tried to keep them out of her voice. “Are you…are you coming to rescue us?”

“Us? How many of you are there?”

>

“There's 4 of us. We can't get out, there's people trying to get in on the landing, and I think they're on the balcony too. I think they're sick, they tried to attack Amy.” The silence on the end of the phone stretched out for what seemed like hours, although it couldn't have been more than 10 seconds. “You aren't coming to rescue us, are you Kara?”

“I'm so sorry Lena. I can't. We can't risk this spreading. We’re moving block by block and hunting down the infected who’ve escaped and it…it affected the aliens first, Lena. It's mutating and it seems some of the humans inside have…changed too now, but I can't…I can't risk infection. If me or Superman were infected, we couldn't be stopped. I just…” Kara trailed off, and Lena heard the pain in her best friends voice.

“That's ok, it's ok. We’ll figure something out. Don't fuss ok?” Lena joked pitifully.

There was a muffled conversation, and Alex's voice came on the line. She sounded stressed out of her mind. In the background, there were muffled gun shots and what sounded like a roar. It sounded like the kind of roar Vera would make when asked what a dinosaur sounded like, except much louder.

“Babe is that you?”

“Alex, darling, I was so worried about you. Are you ok?”

“I'm ok babe. I'm so, so sorry. We’re working on a way to get you out but we just need to control things out here first.”

“Alex, listen to me. You have to get to the kids. Send Kara, send Clarke, go yourself, just please Alex, get to our girls.”

“They're fine Lena, I called Sarah and she’s taking them to Midvale. Eliza will know what do. They should be practically there. Right now we just need to focus on you. Are you safe?”

Lena looked across at the three terrified women, their hopeful expressions which were currently at varying points of falling. The door was being hammered harder than ever before, with the slow steady beat that suggested that the assailant had more room to manoeuvre.

“Safe-ish. I don't think the door is going to last much longer though.” Lena angled herself away from the other women for a little privacy, lowered her voice and whispered into the phone, “Tell me what to do, Alex. How do we get out of the building?”

“Lena you…you can't for now.” The emotion in her wife's voice was clear, the struggle to keep from wobbling. “The ground floor exits have been sealed off. All of them. They've jammed the phones, internet, everything. It's a complete shut down. We had to get Winn to patch us through to your office, and I've been trying to get a team in but…we’re...the DEO is no longer in charge here.”

The words were like a punch in the sternum. There was more muffled conversation on the other end of the line.

“Lena, listen to me ok? Kara says that there is a window cleaner's platform on the southward side, just below the fourth floor cafeteria balcony. If you can get to there, you can get to the ground no problem. The powers still running, the hydraulics will still be working. Do you think you can do that?” The switch from scared wife to ice cold DEO agent was both sudden and incredibly comforting. Lena looked again at the gang of survivors. Sue had started to cry again.

“That's 31 floors down Alex.”

“I know babe, but this is our best shot at getting you out of there for a few days. Do you think you can do this?” She asked again. At the younger woman's hesitation, she said firmly “Listen to me Luthor, you're the baddest woman I know. Remember when we went to paint ball last month and we all ganged up on you? You took every single one of us out, even Maggie and she was cheating for like 90% of the game. There wasn't a speck on you. You can do this. You weren't raised to lose. If it's not a long term safe spot where you are then you need to do this. I need you to do this, Lena. I need you to come back to me. Our girls need you.”

Lena sighed, and rubbed her hand over her forehead. “We can do this Alex. We’ll be there, as soon as we can. Just…just be careful. If you die on me, I'll make your life hell.” Alex chuckled at that.

“I love you Lena. You’re going to be ok. Just…avoid the teeth, the blood, anything like that. We’re running tests but they think it's spread in the fluids. You just…come back to me in one piece ok?”

“You too. I love you darling. Take care of our girls will you?”

Lena hung up before her wife could answer. Setting her face, and before she could lose her bottle, she turned to her colleagues in a gust of bravado that she absolutely did not feel, and announced brightly, “Well ladies, I've got some good news, and then again I've got some bad news.”


	2. Chapter 2

Outside the building that they were now calling ground zero, things were going badly. The DEO had registered only 3 or 4 of the infected L Corp employees escaping the building before Homeland Security had swooped in to seal everything off, but for every one, 6 more people were struck down, and the results were a ripple that moved faster than infected could be taken down. 

The effects were quick: a fainting woozy fever that felled the victim in minutes. When they got back up, moments later, they'd attack anyone on sight, and if they got the chance, they'd eat them too. But that wasn't the creepy thing; Alex had spent her career around homicidal maniacs. she’d seen 3 cases of cannibalism of one sort or another before her second year at the DEO was up. 

What was creepy was that they just didn't stop. They moved like damn puppets, all elbows and knees, scuttling along like spiders, but they were quick and they just kept going. Aliens seemed to hold onto their powers, whether that be razor sharp claws, camouflage, or sheer speed, but even the humans had retained the speed of their pre-sickness days, and they didn't seem to know the meaning of fear. 

Alex herself had seen a human, a tiny woman in her mid forties wearing 4 inch heels and a knee length business dress, take out one of her best agents. The man was a Lavarian who’d lived on earth for longer than Alex had been alive, and his skin was tougher than leather, but when the female had jumped him as he rounded a corner, those small, manicured hands had ripped into the area around his exposed throat like it was tissue.

The businesswoman was still trying to shovel handfuls of the red, sinewy tendons that she pulled out of the gash straight into her mouth when Alex had shot her; the brunette had been about to move on when the Lavarian, blood still gushing out of the wound, had gotten to his feet. She’d gotten a bullet in, but it was a close call.

That was when she'd sent Kara away. The look of hurt her little sister had given her was tough, but the idea of what could happen if either Supergirl or her cousin were infected, if they turned, was enough of a persuasion to the Kryptonians. They could have gone through half the city like knives through butter before anyone would have even thought of kryptonite. In the end, both of the heroes had packed up and headed to Midvale and Metropolis respectively. If they couldn't be of use in National City, Kara reasoned, they could at least be ready to fly their family as far away as possible if things got out of hand. It was a comfort to know that her family would be so well protected while their mothers struggled through this sink of shit (she didn't let herself think about what might happen if the infants ended up needing protection from their guardians, though).

So far, between the security forces and the DEO, they'd secured as quarantine the 6 blocks immediately round L Corp, with another fall back perimeter at 10 blocks out. There were drones in the sky, making sure any runners who managed to slip through the first barricade were picked up and disposed of quickly. 

After speaking with Lena, Alex had asked Winn to patch into the CCTV around L Corp and keep her updated on any indication that the younger woman was nearing her goal.

He hadn't had chance to reply before the comms had been cut off.

Unable to sit by and watch her colleagues in danger, and knowing that for now she could be no more use to her heart inside the building, she had joined the teams going street to street, building to building, evacuating survivors and taking care of the infected within the quarantine zone.

There had been a lot fewer survivors appearing over the last hour, and Alex told herself that it must be because of the evac effort that had already taken place rather than the annihilation of 6 square city blocks.

She motioned her team of 3 to a stop next to an abandoned city bus. Vasquez and Petrov stepped without hesitation into formation, Petrov with eyes on back and Vasquez with eyes on front. Even in the midst of this utter shit storm, their superior thrilled a bit at this show of class. They were like a well oiled machine, and she desperately hoped that they made it through the day so that she could tell them how proud she was.

A noise from the other side of the street made them all jump, but mercifully no one let loose. One poorly timed shot fired would see them all swarmed in moments. Alex squinted through the smoky light towards a large floor-to-ceiling plate glass window that was now lying smashed and gaping open.

It had been Paddy McGuinness’ until about 4 hours ago, one of those mock Irish pubs that played into every semi-racist stereotype you could think of, and charged for it. Lena, who had lived in Wicklow as a child and still struggled to hide her accent, scowled dramatically every time they walked passed. 

There was another noise from inside the dark pub. 

Alex motioned to her team to move in, but as she took her first step, a movement flashed out of murky interior, through the window, and started towards them.

If this had been a horror movie, she thought dumbly, that would have been a cat or something.

This wasn't a horror movie, and that wasn't a cat. It was a fully grown male, about 6feet tall, with a ragged and gaping cut running from navel to muscled peck, and he was sprinting at them. Over his shoulder, she glimpsed the first 3 or 4 of the pubs former patrons stumbling out, all advancing, all open mouthed, all with one goal in mind.

“Into the bus, into the fucking bus!” Alex shouted, scrambling backwards. 

Without visible cause, the bus was dank with the stink of blood and vomit, but it had 2 doors that were able to be wedged closed, making it a paradise compared to the circus outside. The three agents held the doors together as the first infected hit; they moved inwards slightly, but otherwise held. The man's gashed open body provided a shield against those coming after, and despite a worrying creaking every time a new body hit the side of the vehicle or the gathering scrum, the doors remained stable. 

The creatures must have been coming from every hidey-hole in the street, Alex shouted to her team, drawn by the sounds of their comrades on the hunt.

“I'm going to take my hands off the doors; Vasquez, Petrov, can you take the extra?”

“We got it, m’am.” Vasquez’s voice sounded unnaturally calm over the snarling, shrieking, roaring hubbub coming from their assailants.

Quickly, trying not to second guess herself, Alex unclipped a pair of handcuffs, standard issue, and closed them around the hand holds on either side of the door. She did the same at the top of the door with Petrov’s pair, using the shutter irons.

“Ok…that should hold it.”

Without even a look of doubt on her face, Vasquez let go.

The door swung open an inch and then pulled taught on the steel of the cuffs. There was the profound silence of 3 people all taking their first breath in minutes.

“You could at least have counted to 3, boss.” Petrov quipped.

Alex couldn't help the laugh that bubbled up inside her, part relief, and part dumb hysteria. Soon, the 3 of them were doubled up, tears streaming down their face. It felt good. It felt like a validation of being alive. It felt…

Alex stopped laughing abruptly. It felt like the bus had moved under the weight of bodies. It felt like they were-

The bus landed on its side, the glass of the windows which were now against the pavement exploding inwards. Alex felt her back hit the driver booth, a pain shooting through her lower right hand ribs. Winded, she watched the attackers appearing at the still in tact windows that were now the roof of the bus, crawling over the side monkey-like. One of them threw up against the glass of the door, a yellow watery liquid that ran and dripped through the cracks. In disgust, she turned her face away. Her eyes focused in the dim light, and her blood trickled into a cold stream as she realised what she was looking at. At the windscreen were kneeling 5 or 6 of the infected, all staring in wide-eyed, banging on the screen dividing them from their chow. The glass under their pawing hands was a mass of pretty spider web cracks. As she watched, the cracks continued to creep across the pane.

“For fucks sake.” She heard Vasquez say to her right.

She thought of her wife, up there in L Corp tower, and prayed to whatever god happened to be passing that she was doing better than they were.

.......................................................

It had started well, Lena considered, surveying the 6 bodies spread across the floor of her office.

Buoyed up on endorphins, blood spattering her clothes and the make shift face-mask she’d ripped her blouse to make, the CEO was feeling uncharacteristically optimistic. She knew at the back of her mind that later she’d let the shame and the guilt in, that she’d be able to acknowledge that the meat and bones lying on the now greasy floor of her penthouse office had been the people she’d stood next to in the elevator every day, who sent her MI data sets and invites to charity dress down days, people with families and dreams and aspirations. Later she’d be able to think of them as real human people, as her employees and even her friends, but for now that wasn't going to help anyone. Until her and her rag tag crew of survivors were safe, then the infected had to remain as little more than dangerous beasts, rabid creatures to be avoided or, if they had to be faced, put down.

After hanging up with Alex, Lena had explained to the women the situation. 

They'd taken it well. This wasn't the time for hysterics or heated debates, not when the options were limited to fight and possibly live, or wait and die. They’d talked through a few of the finer points, and tried wherever possible to consider some of the pitfalls that they might come across. 

Afterwards, they’d gone about calmly arranging their meagre weapons. They had unscrewed the metal legs of the coffee table to use as clubs with the small selection of tools she’d once tossed into a drawer after a creative afternoon. Ruefully, Lena had left her trusty pistol in its case, shuddering at the memory of how the creatures had reacted to the sound of the phone. Sue had found a pair of scissors, and Amy refused to budge from the fire extinguisher - “Go with what you know” she'd said as if they were discussing brands of baking soda. After a moment of hesitation, Lena had tucked the screw driver into the waistband of her skirt.>

Lindsey had taken on the riskiest job, positioning herself behind the door, one hand clutching the leg of the coffee table; gripping the handle, she’d waited for the others to give her a firm nod before wrenching it open and scattering into the furthest corner of the room.

The first through the door fell through, with two more piling in over him. There was an almost comical moment where both jostled for position, jamming themselves between the frames for a painful moment of static, before bursting forwards. 

Lena had stepped forward and matter-of-factly planted the table leg in a great swinging arc around the side of the nearest’s head. She’d aimed for the ear that was already half off, apparently torn away along with half of the thing’s scalp. She didn't have time to feel satisfaction as it collapsed before a beautiful woman with a white lab coat and a large Afro was lunging over her fallen comrade. Lena took aim and swung; as the pole connected victorious, an unseen hand grabbed her neck from the side and pulled. She stumbled, falling to one knee, and her brain stopped working.

Stilted with fear, all she could see in her mind’s eye was a television programme that she’d watched aged 7, about people who died in perfectly escapable situations because they had frozen in panic. She was so busy convincing herself that she was dead that it took the wet rain of blood from above her to shake her awake.

Above her prone form, the creature was impaled through the bottom of its jaw on the hollow metal pole, that Lena had shoved up on the force of her reflexes. 

To her horror, before her eyes, the body started to move, tugging against the metal still clasped in her hands. She let out a strangled gasp when the former-man in a form fitting shiny grey business suit tumbled sideways, but relaxed when she saw Sue and Amy grinning at her as they threw the lifeless corpse to the ground. Looking around, the CEO was startled to realise that they’d dispatched 6 of the beasts in under 90 seconds.

Yes, Lena thought, wiping the thick blood off her hands with her suit jacket lapels, it had gone very well so far.


	3. Chapter 3

In hindsight, Lena Danvers-Luthor thought bitterly, she should have remembered that pride comes before a fall. Rather than gloating, she could have used the time after the massacre in the exec suite to properly consider all the potential calamities of the next phase of escape, for instance movement activated bloody lighting that was built into the windowless, pitch black stairways, and more importantly, what a sudden burst of light might do to a blood thirsty cannibal looking for moving human bodies to devour.

Instead, here she was, standing on a brightly lit landing 2 flights down from where they’d started, watching the automatic lights flick on floor by floor below.

The growls and blood-curdling shrieks told her exactly what was turning those lights on, and exactly how fucked they now were.

She was still holding her phone in her hand, useless torch light shining out of the back panel, when it started ringing. All four women jumped.

“Alex?”

“Lena this is Winn, I’m going to need you to get yourself down to the next floor, and take that exit, and I'm going to need you to have done it, like yesterday.”

Questions bubbled up but she held them inside. She’d been friends with Winn Schott Jnr for almost as long as she had Kara Danvers, bonding over technology and science and tinkering with things that their other friends often suggested the two nerds shouldn't be tinkering with. She’d learned to trust him, and, cards on the table, it wasn't like their cup was overflowing with options at this point.

“Move down, go! Go! We need to get to the next floor!”

The CEO saw Sue open her mouth to disagree, but she saw it in passing, already taking the stairs two at a time. After half a second, she heard the group begin thundering after her.

Every step was a fight against her instinct, which was screaming at her to go up, to run away from the clambering, hollering crowd pressing up the stairs towards them. 

As her foot hit the next landing, Amy cried out. The door next to where they'd been standing had burst open, spewing out the remnants of the Finance department. 

Lena didn't look back. There was a full flight to go until floor 33, and the lights on floor 29 had just flashed to life.

Lungs burning, high heels clicking, the ragged group cleared the last few feet to the desired door. Lena slammed into it, bouncing back clutching her shoulder when it didn't budge. Tutting, Lindsey palmed her security pass onto the pad next to the door, and herded the younger women through. 

The barrier closed just as Jenny, the head of L Corp’s purchasing team, leapt over the last few steps and landed in a low crouch just outside the door.

Unfortunately for Jenny, her right leg hadn’t been prepared for impact, and as she landed, her entire weight twisted and bore down on the left in retaliation. The snapping of the tibia was audible even through the solid wood and shatter proof glass.

Sue sighed heavily; only that morning she’d laughed herself to tears listening to Jenny recount how, the weekend before, Jenny’s three kids had gotten into a fight over a video game, and how the red-head ended up throwing the disc out of the window of their 7th floor flat.

Lena whirled around and checked the corridor they were in. The lights had come on, but the fact that they were off in the first place was reassuring. She held her breath for a few seconds, waiting to hear the thump of running footsteps or the hiss of hungry chattering teeth, but she was met with only silence, and the sound of the diseased trying to get in through the solid fire door at her back. Raising her mobile again, she asked “Winn?”

The man sighed into the receiver. “Oh thank god, I was starting to think you hadn't made it.”

“Thanks for the faith.” Lena retorted with a smile. “How did you know this floor was safe?”

“Right, well, uh…don't be mad.”

“Winn.”

“I sort of maybe totally hacked the internal security cameras. There's a lot of places I can't see, but the corridors and communal areas are all camera’d up. It's patchy though; who ever they've got controlling this thing is good, like really really good. Same with the phones, and the DEO secure comm line - well, not so secure comm line I guess-“

Lena cut him off, sensing a long term ramble coming on. “So what's the plan? Any thoughts on where we go from here? We need to get to the fourth floor, and we need to get there quick.”

She heard a tapping from the end of the phone that suggested the computer whizz was typing away furiously.

“There’s another set of stairs on the North side of the building, but the lights are out - I’ve no idea what might be in there. You really need to invest in some better cameras.”

“If I make it out alive, Winn, I promise I’ll let you choose them yourself.” The phone relayed silence. “W-Winn?” There wasn't so much as a breath on the end of the phone. “Fuck.”

Lindsey, Amy and Sue were looking at her expectantly. “Any news?”

Pocketing the phone, Lena nodded. “There's a stairwell on the other side of the building. I'm still not keen on trying the elevator, if we got trapped in there...” There was murmured agreement. “And it seems someone out there wants to keep this on the low down. They're cutting off communications, even the CCTV is being blocked. I think we might be on our own after all.”

Lindsey’s brow furrowed “I thought we already were.”

Amy put down the fire extinguisher, and pulled the face-mask down around her neck. “We should search this floor, there might be more weapons or something.”

Lena sucked her teeth. “Might be dangerous. It's quiet here but who knows how many of those things have squirrelled themselves away in the meeting rooms and offices.”

To her boss’s surprise, the secretary grinned manically. “None! Or very few, at least. This floor is HR and Employee Services. They had their away day today - right now, the entire floor is sat in a hotel on the sea front enjoying some company funded team building.” In the face of intense attention, Amy shifted uncomfortably and added, “You told me to put a wedge behind the bar, they're probably pretty shit faced by now.”

“Amy, you are brilliant.” The young woman blushed at the compliment.

They chose the right hand corridor, in the end, on a pure whim. It led to a large open plan office, and Lena felt mildly sick thinking about how many floors in the building were laid out this way. She remembered coldly the week before Christmas when a particularly vicious strain of the flu had moved like wild fire across the wide open offices spaces.

The rows of desks stretched as far as the giant windows on the other side of the building. The floor plate still looked thankfully empty, so they agreed to split into teams of two and start looking for survivors, better weapons or working comms devices. No one mentioned that they were looking for infected too.

Their cursory checks into the meeting rooms and canteens didn't yield any more violent attackers. Lena and Amy even found a sharpish bread knife in the canteen that the younger woman reluctantly agreed to tuck into her belt, and they both pocketed a few packets of pain killers and candy bars taken out of desk drawers just in case. 

A faint spark of hope was starting to strike in the air between the women. Maybe the other stairwell would be empty. Maybe they could glide down to the fourth floor and it would be empty too. They could be outside within the hour, into the relative safety of a National City evening. Lena could be in Alex’s arms before morning, on their way to Midvale and their precious babies. She could almost hear her wife's abominable playlist of 90s classics that always had to be playing on long journeys, could almost feel the older woman's hand resting casually on her thigh. Everything still might be ok, she told herself fervently.

The team reconvened at the end of the office, next to the large double doors with the green running man above them. Lindsey and Sue hadn't found much of use, but they seemed happy enough just to have found no more trouble. Lena’s hand was already touching the push-bar when they heard the shuffling noise behind them. Of course, Lena thought.

Turning resignedly, she saw that the figure a few desks behind them was small, shorter even that Lena without her heels. It was a woman, a very young woman of maybe 22 or 23. She wore a bottle green hijab, and was watching them with large, staring eyes. Sue stepped forward, holding the scissors defensively; the hijabi took a step back, hands raised to show that she meant no harm.

“Sorry, sorry - I didn't mean to interrupt but you really don't want to go that way.” The deep Texas accent calmed the situation slightly. Sue let the scissors fall back to her side.

“Why, what's that way?” Amy asked.

The hijabi was still staring between them, as if trying to work out if they were joking. Eventually, she said, “What's that way? A whole lot of shit, that's what's that way.”

Lena sighed. Of fucking course.

........................................................

Winn was sat in the DEO on the other side of town, frantically trying to hack into the exclusion zone. 

He had no idea who was running the intelligence for this thing, it had gotten pretty confusing once the army had started getting involved, but they were good. Really really good. As soon as he opened up one channel, another would shut down; he hadn't been able to keep even one open for more than a few minutes, either.

He’d had more luck with the L Corp cameras because they were on an internal system, which could be accessed at a push through the main server. But that was its own special torture.

After the line with Lena dropped out again, all he’d been able to do was watch, hope, and keep trying to break through the ever shifting fire wall.

So far so good, he’d kept whispering.

He could see the rest of L Corp bubbling away as he worked; could see the crowds gathered on the ground floor trying to break out, in the hap hazard way the zombie-things had (He couldn't believe no one had started calling them zombies yet; another golden opportunity missed by central government, Winn felt), could see the odd skirmish as a survivor tried to make a run for it. He’d turn away then; there was no way he could do anything to help, so watching it happen made him feel like a sicko watching a snuff movie.

On loud speaker in the background was Kara. She’d been on the phone with him now for the better part of two hours, calling almost immediately after arriving at Eliza’s and making sure everyone was safe. With nothing to do but wait, the super hero was flicking through news channels and social media scouting for any sign of what was happening in National City’s Business District. The white noise of it all, completely absent of the plague that her sister and best friend were battling, was clearly driving the blonde nuts. Winn could hear it in her voice, but he didn't have anything to say to offer reassurance. Occasionally he’d give an update on Lena’s progress, if it was looking good, but mostly they were just making sure they each knew that they weren't alone.

“Yes!” Winn banged his hand on the desk in victory as Alex’s location tracker pinged into existence on his screen, less than a block from L Corp and still with her team. She didn't seem to be moving, but it was surely positive that the little 3 dots were huddled together. His brow furrowed as he scanned the screen for others; there were plenty of them moving around like an old school video game, red ones for DEO, blue ones for HLS, and now a ring of green army dots in the no mans land between block 6-10; occasionally he would see a spot wink out, as the locator was broken. It was anyone's guess how the human equivalent of a black box got broken, but Winn tried not to think of long drops and the crush of bodies. 

Looking back to where Alex was showing as a red spot with her ID number hovering over the top, Winn squinted, leaning closer to the screen. 

There was still no movement either from her, Vasquez or Petrov, but what there was was a herd of green dots, breaking away from the perimeter sea, and edging down the main thoroughfare, halting every hundred yards or so. They were heading directly towards Alex.

“What the hell is going on down there?” He whispered to himself.

“What's happening Winn? Winn? Winn Schott I know you can hear me, will you tell me what's happening down there please?”

Caught up in his own thoughts, Winn didn't even acknowledge his best friend. Instead, with renewed vigour, the IT guru went back to feverishly trying to hack into the secure communications line.


	4. Chapter 4

The inside of the bus was gloomy now, with the press of bodies at the windows getting heavier. A couple more people had drifted to the windscreen, but Alex was trying not to look in that direction because of the little girl.

She was maybe about 6 or 7, with little more noticeable injury than a bloody nick on her cheek, and a vomit stain down the dungarees she was wearing. Her hair under the matting of mud and filth was the same firey red as Alex's own kids, and the put-together agent couldn't look at her for very long without a solid lump forming just below her voice box.

The team hadn't spoken much after the bus fell over and the windshield started going critical; the other two were probably the same as her, alternating between considering their options and wondering about their loved ones on the outside. Alex had a suspicion that Vasquez had someone that she was keeping quiet about. The butch woman had snuck off early one too many times, and had too many hushed phone conversations that ended with her blushing profusely. Petrov, well, Petrov was single - he never shut up about it, asking anyone who would stand still why he couldn't snag a girlfriend, while at the same time having enough hook ups and parties to make Alex’s head spin.

The brunette thought about her family again. She checked her comms for the hundredth time but got only static. Her cell phone still showed no signal. She had to get out of this; had to get back to the family that she’d longed so hard for, that she’d built with Lena brick by brick. When they'd married, Alex had made sure to get a vow in to protect her wife no matter what, and she intended to keep that vow in tact.

“I’m going to check out the back of the bus, I think I see an emergency exit back there.” Standing shakily, wincing at the pain that shot through her ribs, she gestured to her team. “If anything comes through that windscreen, blow its head off.”

Vasquez was already raising the M4 to her shoulder; Petrov eased out of his superior’s way, unclipping his side arm and training it on the broken glass. At the others’ confused stares, he nudged his main weapon with a casual foot and shrugged. “Lost the spare clip a while back. One of the scumbags must have yanked it off.”

Alex began picking her way towards the back of the bus, climbing over seats that were now like hurdles.

She was about three-quarters of the way there, and so intent on her goal, already trying to lean up and squint through the small high window of the emergency exit, that she didn't even realise anything was amiss until she felt the hand grab at her ankle. 

Time slowed down to a trickle. 

It had been a nurse, Alex realised dumbly, wearing the same lilac and greens as the midwives at Our Lady of Grace Memorial Hospital where the Danvers-Luthor’s youngest daughter had been born. The infected woman had been through the mill; everything below her pelvis had been shredded, her lower legs picked clean and her hips sitting open to the clammy air like a putrid bowl. Alex felt completely frozen as these thoughts bubbled up, she couldn't even react or move to pull away as the creature sunk her teeth into the meaty part of the clothed calf.

The pain was immense. 

That, coupled with Vasquez shouting obscenities from over her shoulder, broke the spell.

“Fuck! Fuck!” Alex cried. Swinging her other leg over the seat, she began feverishly kicking the top of the thing’s head. There was the sound of the jaw bone snapping, and she managed to nudge it off, feeling the ice cold sensation of teeth scraping as she did so. 

Fury more intense than any she’d felt before sparked in her belly, aimed solely at the nurse lying on the floor, jawless but still trying to reach out, to grab, to maul. A swift stamp from government issue jack boots put a stop to that. Alex turned slowly, eyes wide and arms outstretched at her sides as if to say “what the fuck just happened?”.

Petrov was advancing, holding out one hand tentatively. “Can you give me the gun please boss? Just to hold onto for you.” Unthinkingly, she handed it over. Petrov checked the safety and placed it on the floor. “Ok boss, now I'm gonna need you to sit down on that chair back right there and roll your trouser leg up, can you do that for me?” 

Alex sat down and quickly did as instructed. Her calf was smeared in thick, globulous blood. The panic started rising, washing the anger and shock away in front of a tide of fear and paranoia. Her hands started moving over the bloodied muscle, feeling the skin, trying to find the contusion that she was sure was going to kill her.

“It's…I can't see the bite…I don't know if…if it broke through the material.” The pain in the attacked calf felt like a terrible bruise, and as she ran her hand over it, it seemed to get worse. “I…I can't find the bite.” She said again, looking up square into the barrel of Vasquez’s gun.

“It's not that I don't believe you m’am,” Susan said in a low voice, “but we’ve all had a shock so how about we just sit here for a few minutes before we do anything rash.”

Alex looked stupidly from the weapon to her colleague’s eyes and back to her blood stained leg.

The bus suddenly seemed to be very small, the pounding on the windows and metal very loud and very close. Alex’s chest wasn't working properly; the great ragged gasps that she was taking weren't giving her enough oxygen. She looked down at her red, wet hands, which were shaking uncontrollably. Was this how it happened - the turning - just a slow loss of control? Was that how the woman lying next to her with the smashed in cranium had felt, as she was being eaten alive by the other passengers? Panic was stopping any rational thought from forming, whispering in her ear that Vasquez must know that she, Alex, was already a dead woman walking. This was it, she realised. She wasn't going to be able to keep her promise to Lena, or her daughters. She’d failed them all. Instead, Lena was going to get out of the L Corp building and find herself in a sea of those animals, unprotected, alone. Her girls would grow up thinking of their mother as a monster who had to be put down, rather than the Mom who had nursed them through countless sick nights and sang them bawdy songs when Lena wasn't listening. She’d been careless, and because of that lapse in concentration, she was going to turn into one of the atrocities fervently trying to get into the bus.

That's why Vasquez is going to shoot you, her traitorous brain stated, matter-of-factly. She came to your wedding and both of your daughters’ Zeved Habat, and now shes going to shoot you in cold blood.

Through the tumultuous sea of panic, she heard Petrov ask calmly, “I’m gonna need you to keep talking for a bit now, boss. Tell me about that lovely family of yours, give an old bachelor hope, eh? What did you do this morning with them?”

Alex gulped in more air, desperately trying to get the words out. “The baby…the b-baby woke…up..early…she…she…isn't s-sleeping.”

Petrov nodded encouragingly. Vasquez’s face was as unreadable as smoke.

“The noise…woke…Vera…up.” Alex realised that her face was wet; it took a few moments to work out that it was from tears and snot that she hadn't even realised she was shedding. “I…brought them…into our…our…bed. L-Lena…got Vera…to s-s-show me…her…song.”

“What song?”

Alex couldn't understand why he was asking such banal questions, while she was sat there dying. The thought made a fresh wave of panic crash in, and she couldn't speak.

“Agent Danvers-Luthor” Vasquez said sternly, “Agent Petrov asked you what song your daughter was singing this morning. Can you answer him please?”

The voice was so detached from the woman Alex had met nearly 15 years earlier, when they were both little more than girls themselves. So much had happened between then and now; they'd faced so much side by side, so many awful things and so many near death experiences that she couldn't count them all on both hands. It was a sobering thought, and helped to push the fear back a little. Wiping her eyes on the coarse material of her jacket, Alex took a slow breath and answered steadily.

“A Mi Burro. Lena says there is no greater pleasure than speaking to someone in their own language, so she’s starting the kids early.”

A few heartbeats passed with no one moving.

Eventually, Vasquez lowered the gun. Pulling out a handkerchief from an inside pocket, she knelt quickly in front of her superior, spit into the cotton, and began to wipe the blood off the offending leg. Alex realised now the panic was subsiding that it had probably soaked through when she smashed the infected's skull. “I knew you wouldn't let me down, Danvers.” Vasquez said quietly.

“I'm sorry for freaking out. I've never felt like that before. We’ve been through so much and I’ve never…well, it just won't happen again.”

Vasquez threw the gore stained rag on the floor a few feet away, and began probing the cleaned muscle with nimble fingers. 

“Don't sweat it. I nearly shit my pants and it wasn't even my leg.” The other woman leaned back on her haunches, and looked sincerely into her friend’s brown eyes. “Look, Danvers, in all the years I've known you, you've never once dropped the ball. Not even once. But this isn't like all those other times; it isn't just you and me. Your wife's in danger this time too, and you're scared for her and worrying what will happen to your daughters if worse comes to worst. I'm telling you though, this was your one chance to freak out, ok? Over and done. Now we’ve got to pull it together, because if we don't, we’re all gonna eat a shovel full of shit. Ok?”

Vasquez stood up abruptly, holding out a grubby hand. Alex rolled down the trouser leg over the mass of bruised skin, grasped the proffered hand, and used it to pull herself up.

“Ok.”

The noise of splintering glass broke the moment. Pivoting, they saw an old man holding a chunk of glass that had been the left hand corner of the windscreen. He stared at it for a second as if unsure what to do, then threw it away to focus solely on trying to squeeze through the new gap. The hole wasn't big enough; the sharp edges were slicing off hunks of skin from the top of his bald head, and at each shove, the glass bent further inwards from the hole out, causing the cracks to widen and run.

Without stopping to communicate, Alex pushed on towards the back door, taking a second to check each seat before scrambling over this time.

She was reaching for the handle when she heard the explosive sound of the glass finally giving in, one great symphony of shattering, as the whole windscreen collapsed at once. She swirled back around, diving for her gun which was still by Vasquez’s feet. No time, there was no time left, she thought as she slammed the safety off. She raised the gun to her shoulder, finger on the trigger and-

There was an earth-shaking volley of gunshots. The air stood still inside the bus. The infected that had been racing over the strewn glass and off kilter seats stopped in their tracks. Then they turned, almost as one, and began retreating the way they'd come. The sounds of feet running across the side of the bus was heard before people started raining down in front of the derelict windscreen like lemmings off a cliff. No one spared so much as a glance in the DEO agents direction, all intent on the fire war apparently happening at the other end of the street.

Silence reined for a minute, as each survivor tried to fathom that they were still alive.

Finally, Alex turned to her team and said, carefully, “I guess we should get out of here then. See what all the fuss is about.”

Without waiting for an answer, she shouldered her firearm, climbed up to the emergency exit, and swung the door open. Vasquez and Petrov watched her pull herself through before dazedly following suit.


	5. Chapter 5

The woman on floor 33 was called Haifa; she was 22 years old, and it was her first week on L Corp’s prestigious Mechanical Engineering Graduate Programme. 

That afternoon, she’d been sat in the cafeteria on floor 4, the Training Centre, with six of her new colleagues, excitedly raking over their second day of induction and trying to get the measure of each other. It was pretty terrifying, the young engineer said, because until 3 days earlier she’d never even left Houston.

They’d just finished eating when the double doors burst open and their tutor, Don McGee, a middle aged grey-haired man with a gruff Glasgow accent, had stumbled in. He wobbled from side to side, knocking things off tables and horrifying the other patrons of the bustling cafeteria. On his back, piggy back style, was a younger man in a white coat stained red at the sleeves. The younger man seemed to be nuzzling McGees neck, and the boy next to Haifa had giggled uncertainly.

It wasn't until the younger man jumped backwards with a chunk of their tutor's flesh in his mouth that people started panicking.

Haifa and her class made for the door just as McGee attacked the server who’d rushed to help him.

The corridors were a nightmare of people screaming, fighting and running. Most of the classrooms were already occupied with terrified students and teaching staff barricading the doors. The main staircase was a solid wall of bodies, so entwined together that it was hard to tell who was infected and who wasn't. With their options dwindling by the second, the group had pivoted and run full throttle to the fire escape staircase on the other side of the building, bursting through the door and face to face with a seething mass of the very creatures they were trying to avoid.

Haifa had felt Dan Williams, the only one of her new class mates that she’d properly spoken to, grab her arm and push her roughly up the stairs. Dan seemed like a friendly guy, and she was in no place to argue, so she did as indicated and ran up. 

By the time she reached the 33rd floor, her legs were screaming and she was going at no more than an amble. It was then that she realised she was alone. There were no footsteps behind her, and she couldn't see Dan on the stairs she'd just run up; standing very still, all she could hear was her own laboured breathing and a few faint shrieks drifting up from far below. 

Hesitantly, the hijabi had stuck her head over the railing, and whispered “Dan?”. 

The floors below sprang into pandemonium. What felt like hundreds of red-eyed heads appeared as if from no where, all turned upwards, all focused solely on Haifa.

The girl shook her head, rubbing a hand across her eyebrows. “So I nipped through the landing door, and just stayed here, waiting for the police or army or whoever to come rescue me.”

“I don't think anyone's coming, Haifa.” Lena said softly.

The five women were sat in a circle on pilfered office chairs, sharing some of the candy bars and water they’d rustled up.

Lindsey put a gentle hand on the girl’s knee. “So this stairways off limits then?”

Haifa nodded, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “Yeah. If you put your ear to the door you can hear them right outside. They make some ungodly noises.” 

Lena sighed. “So that's both sets of stairs out of question. Unless one of you has been holding out on us and can fly, we’re taking the elevator.”

Sue looked stricken. “Do you think that's a good idea? I mean if it breaks down and we’re trapped there…or what if the door opens at floor four and it's packed with those things? We wouldn't even make it onto solid ground.”

Lena pressed a hand over her eyes. “We can't stay here forever, Sue. I don't see what other choice we have.”

Haifa cleared her throat. “We don't have to take the elevator, you know. We could just climb down the service ladders in the lift shaft. Then when we get there, we could crack the door and just take a peek, see what we’re dealing with.”

“That's a pretty good idea.” Lena said, a smile forming. How had she not thought of that? 

As if reading her mind, Haifa shrugged and said, “My mom is a civil engineer, I've been around this stuff since before birth.” Lena grinned.

“So, this is awkward, but I didn't catch any of your names?” The young woman asked.

........................................................

Lena wedged the business end of the screw driver between the metal doors and began to lever it from side to side. 

Haifa was hovering at her shoulder anxiously. Since finding out that one of the survivors in front of her was CEO of the company where she’d gotten her first ever proper job, the girl had oscillated between deference and cheek reddening shyness. It was both endearing and excruciating.

“Mrs Danvers-Luthor, are you sure that you don't want me to do that?”

Lena leaned her weight into the knife, jamming the door open a bit further. “No thanks Haifa, and please, given the circumstances, just Lena is fine.”

Not keen on putting her hands blindly into the gap if she could avoid it, Lena gestured Sue to try and push one of the metal table legs in instead. Using it as a lever, the two women heaved the left hand door open enough to look through. Using the torch on her I Phone, Lena stared into complete emptiness.

“Looks like we’re clear.”

Between them they manhandled the doors fully open and leaned out into the darkness. The up-draft blew Lena's hair with a warm breeze. She couldn't see the lift either above or below. Using her blazer to tie the metal bar to her hip, the CEO slipped off her heels and tucked them slipper first into her waistband.

“I'll go first. Just take each step one at a time, and yell if you need to rest. We do this as a team, ok?”

The other women nodded their assent.

Lena stopped breathing as she felt around the side of the wall inside the shaft, leaning out into the abyss with only Lindsey pinning her arm to the wall to ground her. A cold wash of doubt was starting to set in that Haifa must have been wrong, that there was no ladder there, when her hand connected with cold, gritty metal. Inching round the wall, she felt her stockinged foot touch one of the rungs, and, metaphorically grasping the nettle, swung herself out. The dark was all encompassing, but at least it hid the long drop below her. Moving to the furthest edge of the ladder, she used the torch light to direct Haifa onto the other side. Moving down, Haifa did the same for Amy, then Lindsey, and finally Sue.

The descent wasn't as bad as expected. The ladder was sturdy and the air warm but fresh. The only negative was the occasional horrific sounds as they passed the doors on a lower floor. They hadn't discussed it, but no one made a move to find out what the sounds were. A growl, a high pitched shriek, sobbing - it didn't matter, there was nothing they could do.

To pass the time, Lena focused on how Alex would look when they saw each other again. The agent’s auburn hair was growing longer again, down to touching her shoulders now. It would probably be windswept and a bit tangled, after a long day in the field. She’d be wearing the all-black uniform that showed off her figure, and crossing her arms over her chest with a sardonic expression. Lena imagined her smiling and pulling her shorter wife into one of those wonderful warm bear hugs. She’d smell like oranges, coffee and gun powder, a smell particularly unique to the oldest Danvers sibling, and Lena would bury her face into that scent, into those strong arms, and know they were both safe.

They’d moved down 13 floors and were halfway between 20 and 19, arms feeling like jelly, when they heard the grinding.

“Hold up guys, what's that?” Amy called out.

The five women stood quietly, listening intently, dragged from the peace of their own thoughts. It was a funny grinding rattling sound, that seemed to be making the ladder shake under their hands.

“It's the fucking lift.” Sue said quietly, then louder, “fuck me, it's the fucking lift! Is it moving up or down?”

Lena stared down into the darkness; floors below, she thought she could see a patch of lighter darkness rising up. “Up, its coming up! Get to the floor above!”

When she neared the doors at floor 20, Sue was unsuccessfully trying to open them using the pair of scissors she’d pocketed in Lena’s office, her legs tangled in the ladder to keep from falling. The metal wasn't strong enough, and the blades kept bending. Frantic, Lena scrambled over and across the panicking women in her way, leaning over to pass her EA the screwdriver. The elevator was a constant roar now, and glancing backwards, she could see it steadily moving forwards, just enough of a gap between machine and ladder to smear an average sized woman thinly up all 15 floors.

“Help me!” Sue screamed, shoving a hand in the small gap she’d made and pushing with all her strength. Lena grasped the other door and pulled. Once the doors were open wide enough to admit a skinny body, Sue struggled through, and braced herself between each door to force them open further.

“Move, go! Go!” Lena helped push Lindsey through, Sue unceremoniously dragging the older woman the rest of the way. Amy threw her absurdly heavy weapon through the gap and all but leapt in, reaching back to grasp Haifa’s hand. Lena looked down and swallowed. The lift was 2 floors down, mere seconds away. 

Haifa’s legs were barely through before the Luthor jumped for safety, landing ungracefully and knocking all the air out of her lungs. She scrabbled at the lino for purchase, hips and legs still wiggling in the danger zone.

Relief flooded in as she felt strong hands grab the back of her blouse and yank her all the way through, a millisecond before the lift shot passed. 

The hands continued to pull her up, onto her feet, dragging her forwards.

Eyes adjusting to the gloom, Lena found herself looking square into an infected man’s gaping moustachioed mouth. Squealing, she pushed herself back wards, automatically bringing both feet up to kick the beast’s soft gut. The creature grunted and toppled forwards, winding its prey and crushing her legs under its ungainly weight.

It snapped and snarled, trying to manoeuvre in any which way that might bring it closer to its goal. She was holding it off using both hands pressed into its flabby neck, desperately wishing that the climb down hadn't taken so much out of her arms, when the man’s head exploded.

A shower of blood, brain matter and bone rained down across her face, pebble dashing her skin, clothes, and the floor for a metre in every direction. She rolled the corpse off her and staggered back, trying to wipe the fluids off her face with equally dirty hands.

“Stop!” She heard Haifa’s voice call out, a small hand grasping her wrist tightly to stop her boss from falling into the open lift shaft.

“No! Get back!” Lena shouted angrily, wrenching her hand away. Using fingers as claws to clean the lids, she opened her eyes.

Her friends were standing nearby, breathing heavily from their exertions. Around their feet were at least a dozen bodies. Their weapons were covered in gore, clothing tattered by grasping hands, but they were all in one piece and Lena didn't think she’d seen many more beautiful sights. In the midst of them was a man. He was small, with a monk’s balding head, and in his hands he held a shotgun. She’d been so intent on not getting crushed by the elevator, she hadn't even heard the sounds of scuffling going on above.

Pursing her lips tightly together, she used the relatively clean hem of her blouse to wipe the blood away before speaking again. “Don't come near me, not yet. I don't know if the blood went in my mouth or my eyes or where ever. Just…give it a minute.”

The man raised his gun an inch, before Lindsey’s hand clamped firmly on the barrel. "She said, give her a minute.”

The seconds ticked by. Lena looked towards the huge windows where night was drawing in. The lights outside had come on, making the drab greys of concrete and glass festive. She’d always loved the city, the ability to disappear into a crowd. Her heart rate was settling back down after the initial shock, and she began to test her mind slightly. That was probably what started to go first, she reasoned, if an infection was taking hold.

Whispering to herself, she muttered 24 x 19 = 456. Her daughters’ birthdays were on 15th June and 26th January, and it had been raining on both days when they were born; the pain had been incredible. For Christmas last year, Kara had brought the entire family Supergirl onesies, and then laughed so hard when they showed up wearing them on Boxing Day that the hero had thrown up half masticated Turkish Delight. A minute had gone by, and Lena was on the second verse of A Mi Burro, when Haifa reached out to touch her arm.

Lena nodded at the younger woman. “It's ok. I'd be showing symptoms by now if I was infected, from what I’ve heard.”

There was a communal sigh of relief.

Turning to the stranger, Lena hissed “You could have bloody killed me. What the hell did you think you were doing?”

The man sniffed haughtily. “I thought you'd be a goner already.”

“Who even are you?” Amy asked, cradling the fire extinguisher like it was a baby.

The man looked smug, adjusting his brown tie. It matched the tweed suit he wore. “I'm the man who can get you out of here.”

Lena frowned, opening her mouth to ask questions, but he cut her off.

“If I want to, that is.”


	6. Chapter 6

While Lena was trying to keep it together in L Corp, and Alex was getting her ass handed to her in the streets of National City, Kara Danvers was sat in Midvale feeling utterly and completely helpless.

Vera was on the floor with Eliza, despite the grandmother’s complaints that once down she wouldn't get back up. The small child was slowly and precisely drawing out her letters and numbers, to much applause whenever she got them right. Baby Edith was lying on the settee next to her aunt, having cried herself to sleep 20 minutes earlier.

The more the hero searched through the news channels and social media sites, the less she seemed to find on National City, let alone the crisis she’d left behind her. It was as if the more time trickled on, the more the city was being wiped from view, obscured from the eyes of the rest of the world. It was terrifying, alarming and, most of all, infuriating.

Hearing her daughter sigh loudly for the third time in as many minutes, Eliza turned away from her grandchild with a comforting smile. “Still no news?”

Kara slumped back onto the sofa, causing Edith to bounce and then swat the air in her sleep. Kara tucked the blanket closer round her baby niece before responding. “Not a peep. It's absurd, it's like they've removed all mention of NC. Its getting to the stage now where I can't even find people based in National City on Twitter. How can they even do this?”

There was no answer from the other side of the room.

Looking up, Kara saw her mother looking pensively at the television.

“Nanny, look. Nanny! Look!” Vera demanded, waving the crayon at the older woman, but receiving no response.

“Kara. I need you to look after the girls. I'm going into town.” Eliza was already on her feet, already picking up her jacket and car keys.

Kara stood up, brow furrowed. “Where…where are you going?”

Eliza stopped with her hand on the front door handle. She hesitated, then gestured her adopted daughter to come closer, out of hearing of the little girl intently watching them from the living room.

“Kara,” she whispered. “If the news is being censored and private accounts are being withheld, then I’m starting to worry that this is getting out of hand. I'm going to get food and bottled water, just in case.”

“You think it's going to reach us, don't you?”

Eliza rubbed her forehead. “Sweetie I don't know, I really hope not, but if it does, I've got my daughter and my grandkids here. I'm not taking any chances.”

Kara put her hands on her mom’s shoulders. “Then let me go. If this reaches town, it's better I'm out there than you. Please, mom.”

Eliza laughed, and hugged her youngest daughter close. “Kara, if this reaches Midvale, then I want you here, ready to fly those girls as far away as possible.” Stepping back, Eliza smiled slightly falsely. “While I'm gone, try and make this place a bit more secure for me, ok?”

Without waiting for an answer, the doctor left and seconds later the sound of her 4x4 pulling down the driveway could be heard.

“Auntie?”

Turning round, the blonde saw her eldest niece now standing in the doorway to the hall. In one hand, she held the piece of paper that she’d been drawing on, and her green eyes were wide.

“Hey, pumpkin. How do you fancy helping me put your sister down for a proper nap, and then we can do some home improvement. How does that sound?” Kara reached out for the child. Alex was constantly berating her sister for picking her nieces up, convinced that it would make the girls lazy, but Kara couldn't help wanting to be as close as possible to the small humans while she had the chance.

The girl let herself be scooped up, and once settled on her aunt’s hip, nodded expressively, her ginger ringlets wildly shaking.

Kara had found some old wooden boards in the crawl space under the house, and with a little help from Vera (more hindrance than help if she was being honest, but she would never dream of telling the three year old this) had boarded up the large patio windows and some of the bigger bay windows on the ground floor. While working, she’d noticed some odd looks from people walking along the dirt path that ran between the house and the sea, and it had spurred her to work quicker. The thought of the infected racing down that foot path towards the heart of the family froze her bones.

It only took a few hours to Zombie-proof the ground floor as far as possible. The inside of the house felt dark and boding, lit now by lamp light instead of sunlight. Eliza wasn't back yet, and Kara had started to worry.

When Edith woke up, Kara made an early dinner for the three of them, a modest plate of pasta stowed in the oven for the grandmother. Then, settling the eldest child in front of the TV and the latest Disney hit, there was nothing for Kara to do but pace, and worry.

National City was now completely dark, and she felt adrift. The baby was restless, so she gratefully carried her, whispering odds and ends to settle the little human.

She was mid-pace when the sound of car tyres on gravel could be heard.

“Nanny!” Vera shouted, jumping to her feet and running to the front door. Kara caught her before her hand reached the knob.

Eliza opened the door and shuffled through, her arms full of bags. She smiled when she saw Kara and the girls looking pensively at her. Vera was squirming to get out of her aunt’s arms.

“Hey girls, sorry I took so long. Have you eaten?”

“We had some pasta, i made you a plate. It's in the oven.” Kara said. “Edith was a bit fussy, she only had a couple of bites of the banana purée.”

Eliza walked into the large kitchen and put the bags down, reaching for her grandchildren. “Kara honey, there's some more stuff in the car, can you bring it in for me?”

Kara handed over her nieces, much to Edith’s disapproval, and super speeded out to the car. Loading up on grocery bags, she was turning back to the house when she noticed a hard metal case, about the size of a brief case, sat on the passenger seat. Juggling the other bags, she grabbed the case and raced back to the house.

Eliza was putting away the shopping, the microwave humming behind her as it warmed her dinner through. Edith was sat in her high chair chewing through a rusk biscuit that was slowly turning to mush in her small hand. Kara loaded her armful on the cold hob, and stroked the little girl's head absent-mindedly.

“Where's Vera?”

Eliza looked over her shoulder. “She's measuring the living room doors in case we need to nail up more boards. She's been explaining to me about the “5 Ps” that apparently her moma uses - I’m definitely going to have to talk to Lena about that.”

Kara chuckled; she’d often heard her best friend talk about the 5 Ps, the phrase a throw back to the few years she’d lived in London the brunette had explained. “Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance”. Kara wondered how the CEO was coping now, under the strain of such an unpredictable turn of events.

“You did a good job, by the way.” Eliza smiled at her daughter.

“Thanks.” Kara acknowledged, reaching for the nearest bag to start helping stash their provisions. The bag contained fresh milk, and without thinking about it she x-rayed the bags to ascertain if anything else needed to go in the fridge. Her eyes fell on the metal case. Behind her, the microwave dinged.

“Mom?”

“Mm?”

“Why do you have a gun?”

...................................................

Dusk was settling outside. Edith and Vera were playing next to the empty fire place, Edith handing her older sister funny shaped blocks to hammer into different holes that had been cut into a plastic cube. It was noisy work, given their complete indifference to the actual shapes of either blocks or holes. A few feet away, Kara and Eliza were whispering, making sure to keep one eye on the other side of the room.

“I don't understand mom. You hate guns, you always have.”

Eliza sighed. “I do, I do hate guns, but this is an exceptional circumstance. Those are my grandchildren over there, Kara, and you're my daughter. I will do anything at all to protect them and you, the same as if you were my biological daughter.”

“If the infection spreads here, I’ll just pick us up and spirit us away. We’ll just keep moving until everything gets back to normal, until it's safe. You won't even need to fight!”

>

The older woman looked at her daughter with a deep frown.“Kara, we wouldn't be able to run forever. You'd have to land and rest eventually, and if…when…we encountered those things, there's a chance that you could become infected too. If you did, and you were fully powered, I don't know what might happen, but I do know that me and those girls wouldn't stand a chance against…” Eliza shut her eyes, lowering her voice again. “I've been thinking-“

>

Kara jumped in, horrified. “I would never hurt you or the girls!”

“Of course you wouldn't, I've never doubted that for a second, but if you get infected, if you turn, its not you anymore honey. I-I don't want to have to ask this, but I've given it some thought and I think it might be safest if you could wear this for the time being. Just until everything is under control.” Eliza brought her hand from her cardigan pocket, holding a small box.

“What is it?” Kara asked, already suspecting the answer.

“Jonn left it for me after the red kryptonite incident. It's…it's a green kryptonite bracelet. Just enough to dampen your powers to a human level. Enough so that if you became…ill…I’d be able to restrain you, keep you safe until we can find a cure or a vaccine or something. Until we could turn you back.”

The superhero looked from the box to her mother incredulously. “You've had that for all this time and you never once mentioned it? I can't believe you would keep this from me! What, are you scared of me, is that it?”

“Kara, I-“

“Auntie Kara?” Looking down, Kara saw Vera standing by her feet, tugging patiently on her aunt’s jeans.

“What is it pumpkin?”

Vera held up the other hand. It was obvious that she was trying not to cry, her cheeks turning pink with the effort and green eyes full to the brim with unshed tears. The nail of the index finger on the presented hand was already turning bruise blue, a little red cut running just above the cuticle. 

“Hit m’ finger.”

Kara swept the child up, examining the injury. Her niece’s hand could have fit into hers five times over, and it was suddenly terrifying to think of how small and fragile the little body in her arms was; how easily even a person with regular strength could cause irreparable damage. The memory of the day that Vera was born drifted to mind, of how she’d anxiously waited in her apartment for the phone to ring, flying by the hospital a few times an hour just to check on their progress. How seeing her friend in pain and unable to abate it had swollen her heart with emotion. And how, once it was all done, she’d been the first person allowed in the delivery room so that her sister, face tear stained with joy, could proudly and gingerly hand her the child that Lena had gone through hell for. As soon as that tiny bundle was in her arms, Kara had realised that she would do anything, anything at all, to make sure that her niece was kept safe and happy for the rest of her life.

Gently, the blonde pressed a kiss to the bruised nail.

“Let's go get you a special band aid, make it all better eh?” Glancing at her mother, she continued slowly, “and then you can help me to put on the special bracelet that nanny got for me, ok?”

Eliza was putting the girls down upstairs when Kara’s phone rang. She snatched it up, only half disappointed when it showed Winn’s name rather than Alex or Lena.

“Winn, what's happening? Have you gotten through to Alex?”

“No Kara, I still can't get through the blockade. I've never seen anything this water tight! I'm still trying, of course I’m still trying, but I've found something else I think you should know.” On the other end of the phone, Winn took a deep breath. “The blackout seems to be confined to the 6 blocks of the quarantine zone. It's weird. I managed to get into the army line in no-man's land, and, well, the comms shut-down…it isn't them. They're as frustrated as us. None of the special or armed forces have any control over it. They're managing to keep things offline, stopping this going viral outside of the quarantine, but inside? They're as helpless as we are.”

Kara gaped at the phone for a few seconds before pressing the handset back to her ear.

“What does that mean, Winn?”

The silence ticked on until she asked again, worrying that the line had been cut.

“Kara,” her friend said eventually, falteringly. “The signal blocking the comms and the CCTV feeds, however they're doing it…it's coming from inside the danger zone. I don't think…”

“You don't think what, Winn?” Kara demanded forcefully.

“Kara, I don't think this was an accident. I think someone inside of L Corp is orchestrating the whole thing.”


	7. Chapter 7

The floor around the soldiers was already a carpet of corpses 2 or 3 deep. There were 24 of them formed into a tight square of 2 rows. Every time the shooter in the front row ran out of ammo, they would crouch down to reload while their twin in the row behind took aim, creating a wall of bullets that tore the flood of infected to pieces. The stream of people racing towards the noise was turning into a trickle now, and the detachment had begun to move slowly towards the safety of a building across the street.

Alex, Vasquez and Petrov lay on their bellies on top of the upturned bus, watching intently. “Ready?” Alex asked, pushing onto her knees.

Petrov holstered his weapon and nodded. Vasquez flicked the safety off her M4 and said, cooly, “M’am.”

Alex leapt from the edge of the vehicle and into a roll to absorb the impact. Directly opposite was a solid looking Perspex door, hanging half open, and it looked to be largely in one piece. She ran for it, keeping low as she could without losing speed. She heard Petrov land ungracefully behind her; Vasquez, though, was always cat-like, even in training. 

As Alex reached spitting distance of the door, a flash of blue caught in her peripheral vision. Without breaking stride, the brunette raised her gun and pistol whipped the infected in the face. What was left of his face, she registered; the nose and lips had been messily gnawed off in some earlier horror.

Skipping through the door, she flicked her torch on, gun poised. The entrance led to a smallish reception area, shabbily decorated with little more than a rickety table, on which stood a potted plant and signing in book. On one peeling wall hung a board full of brass plaques giving a run down of the businesses on each floor. To the left was another door with the shutters firmly closed over it; probably leading to the cafe next door, Alex thought. To the right there was a narrow staircase winding up into apparently empty darkness. 

Behind her, Vasquez and Petrov barrelled in, and without being asked to, shifted the table in front of the locked door for the comfort it gave. A second later bloodied hands slapped on the Perspex; one appendage was completely missing fingers and bleeding profusely.

The agents set about checking their guns and ammo, not meeting each other's eye when they found it a lot sparser than they would have liked.

Alex took a swig from the canteen that had been hanging at her belt, and leaned close to the door to look sideways down the street. She had to peer round the faceless man, who looked even worse close up.

“Seems like our friends are in safe but they've got quite the crowd outside.”

Vasquez broke off a piece of energy bar and ate it thoughtfully. “You know, when I was training we were told that a lot of buildings this age tend to be joined together, by a door or a passageway.” She said, pushing the candy back into one of her innumerable pockets. “That way they could be let as one whole or two smaller units.”

Alex took another drink, her eyes never leaving the group hammering to get in next door. “Maybe we should go see our rescuers then, thank them properly.”

There was the sound of a clip slamming home as Petrov loaded his hand gun and stood up sharply. “Boss, I've got one clip left in this pea shooter and zero fucking patience remaining for those fucking things outside. I'm game.”

Alex smiled grimly, rehousing her canteen and fixing the gun into the safe position against her body, barrel pointing at the floor. “I'll take point. Vasquez, you bring up the rear.”

They moved as one towards the stairwell, slowly ascending cross step, and stopping every few feet to listen for noises. By the time they reached the first floor landing, it was apparent that the shit here had hit the fan pretty badly. The first floor had been a call centre. The reception desk out front had been damaged so badly that the whole thing had been ripped out of its moorings, and now lay off to one side, half blocking the double doors to the main office. Alex’s foot nudged a woman's high heeled shoe as she advanced. It's former occupant was nowhere to be seen, but a scrap of bloodied polyester-looking material was stuck to the laminate of the desk. It looked to be held in place by a slurry of gore.

Through the glass windows set in the heavy double doors, the call centre looked deserted. Chairs lay on their sides and there were smears of blood on a few of the surfaces, but it seemed empty of any drooling cannibals. There were no other doors in the reception area; from one of the floors above a guttural groaning could be heard, along with the sound of many dragging feet. Glancing back at her team, Alex made a decision. She gestured for them to move forward and stay sharp.

The office was spacious and open plan, but cheaply decorated. Most of the chairs looked second hand, and a lot of the head sets strewn across the floor and desks had seen better days. There was a room to the side with a sign above the door-less entrance that read “Staff Kitchen”, and next to that another room, this one closed by a windowless door with deep scratches in the magnolia paint. A handwritten label had been stuck at eye height, marked “Meeting Room 1”. The office was only 8 rows of desks deep, with 2 sets on either side of a thin gangway. At the far end was another set of double doors; the windows on these had been papered over with yellowing A3 pages at some point in the distant past. 

Alex began to move down the central aisle, fighting the urge to rush. The noises from above had intensified, and from somewhere close a droning ticking noise could be heard, like someone clicking their tongue very fast. Alex was almost at the end of the bank of desks, her team right behind her, when she heard the screech. 

She turned around to see a woman sprinting out of the break room. She wore a pastel green sun dress that hung above the knee, and her long blonde hair was flowing loose behind her. She had pinned a large round badge over her left breast that read “Team Leader” in big bright lettering. There didn't seem to be anything physically wrong with her.

“A survivor!” Petrov whispered excitedly, lowering his gun just as the woman, who couldn't have weighed more than 112 pounds, collided full throttle, sending them both crashing to the floor. Vasquez was closest and reached in to pull the woman off, yanking just enough and just in time for the woman's perfectly white teeth to miss the male’s thick jugular by a millimetre.

Suddenly finding herself holding in her bare hands a struggling, snapping 5’6” of infected psychopath, Vasquez swore loudly. Spinning, she managed to bring the thing’s head firmly into contact with the corner of a desk, but the centrifugal force dragged her down on top of the still squirming body. Alex was still trying to get a clean shot when the experienced agent managed to pry a hand away from the gaping hopeful mouth to wrap in the lovely picture perfect blonde locks. Grunting with the effort, she slammed the things head onto the floor, again and again. Blood spattered like juice from a crushed melon.

“Vasquez,” Alex hissed, “She's dead Vasquez, you can stop now.” 

Taking a step forward, Alex hesitated. The other woman rolled off the now still corpse, a handful of blonde hair, complete with attached scalp held in one hand. She was breathing heavily. “Susan are you…Are you bitten? Did the blood get in your mouth?”

There was a long pause filled only by Vasquez gasping for breath. “No.” She managed to say.

“Tony?”

Petrov was still sat on the floor, his head in his hands. Hearing his name he raised his arms to check, even wiping over his neck in the hunt for contusions. “No, me neither.”

Alex breathed again.

The thumping started before Vasquez and Petrov had even gotten to their feet. It was loud and hard enough that the door to Meeting Room 1 was already jumping on its hinges. The uncared-for wood gave way at the same time as the sound of footsteps came tearing down the stairs above. From out of the meeting room poured a flood of people. They stood, blinking in the light, looking like drunks trying to work out what happened the night before. From what Alex saw, they could have been normal, healthy humans. The woman Vasquez destroyed could have locked her team in there to save them from herself. But this would have to remain all supposition, because she was already running, dragging a bewildered Vasquez with her by the shoulder of her bullet proof vest.

From behind them came the sound of the main doors slamming open and the roaring of the zombie creatures. There was screaming too, but it was hard to tell if it was the hungry rage of the infected or the terrified sound of people coming face to face with their nightmares. Alex didn't look back. There were times when you had to pick your battles, and there were times when a second to glance over your shoulder would get you killed. Alex knew without conscious thought that this was both.

The run was like a nightmare in itself; the harder her legs pumped, the further away the double doors at the far end of the office seemed to get. Eventually though, she was close enough to grab the handles and pull the door open, all but throwing Vasquez through.

“In! In!” Petrov screamed through laboured breaths. He was still ten feet away, and behind him was a seething sea of people with twisted, angry faces, climbing over furniture and knocking each other to the ground to get ahead. They were quite literally right on his heel. 

Alex stood her ground, keeping the door open with one hand, gesturing mutely for Petrov to hurry up. He was close, so close - Alex reached out an arm, ready to pull him in, poising to slam the door shut as soon as he was over the threshold.

And then it all went to fuck.

Alex watched in horror as Petrov went down. Maybe one of the falling people chasing him got a lucky catch on his heel, or maybe he just tripped over his own feet. Either way, he landed heavily, arms stretched out in front of him, finger tips almost on the metal sill. Alex dived for his hands, but he was wrenched back before she even got close enough to touch.

The scrum was a riot, the infected pulling at each other and viciously fighting in their rush to get a taste. Alex and Vasquez were momentarily forgotten. The hollering amplified, Petrov shrieking in pain as teeth found their mark. Alex scrambled to her feet, and quietly closed the door, sliding the stock of her gun between the metal handles to act as a lock.

She felt like the most callous bitch to have ever lived. Anthony Petrov had started late at the DEO, transferring over from the regular army when an injury in the field got him an honourable discharge. The DEO had never had a qualm about taking on the talented cast-offs from the other forces, and he had proven himself to be a capable agent who gained not only the respect but also the genuine fealty of the crews who worked with him. And now he was out there, being ripped to shreds by the very people he’d spent his entire adult life protecting.

Alex stepped back from the door as the first bodies hit it. Apparently Petrov hadn't lasted very long between so many hungry mouths.

Looking around wildly, they found the staff toilets, and on the opposite wall, another door marked 11A.

“This is it, I think this is it!” Vasquez shouted, pulling out a set of lock picks and dropping to her knees in front of the unsophisticated Yale lock.

The double doors were straining under the weight. The paper over the glass had ripped and the pane itself was giving way already. Alex raised her side arm, trying to keep her breath even. “Fucking come on Vasquez.”

Vasquez didn't break concentration enough to answer.

The glass shattered in one window, arms shooting through eagerly, slicing open skin and veins on the remaining shards at the edge of the frame.

“Fucking get that lock open!” Alex shouted, panic rising now.

The top hinge on the right hand door came loose, the door tilting forwards.

“Fuck!” Vasquez shouted. Her hands were shaking, making the picks rattle in the lock.

The damaged door was leaning in enough to let a body begin to squirm through the top corner. The bottom hinge was creaking, the strain proving too much for the rusty metal. Alex moved to pull Vasquez away. “Hide in the toilets, come on, move-“

The door Vasquez was feverishly working on swung in. The short haired woman toppled forwards with a squeak. A fully suited and booted soldier, complete with a hazmat mask, stood stock still for a second before gesturing for Alex to get inside. She didn't need telling twice. Vasquez crawl-scrambled through enough to let them close the door, and as the lock clicked into place, the crash of wood, glass and dozens of bodies hitting the floor outside could be heard.

They were led down a dark corridor into a large, brightly lit office. It was full of packed bookshelves, and a huge desk, an antique type with green leather inset such as you might see a bank manager use in a Hollywood film. There were several soldiers milling around the entrance, but inside there was just one, perched on the edge of the desk and bearing the stripes to show that they were in command.

“Who are you?” Alex demanded rudely as soon as they were alone.

The soldier pulled off their mask, revealing dark hair French braided tightly down her neck and exotic blue eyes, sparkling with amusement.

“Major Lucy Lane.” Alex stated. Next to her, Vasquez had stood up a little straighter, arms clasped behind her back. Old habits die hard, Alex thought.

“Agent Susan Vasquez and Agent Alex Danvers, as I live and breathe.” Lucy said, rubbing away the red marks that the tight rubber of the mask had left on her face.

“Danvers-Luthor, for some time now.” Alex corrected automatically.

“Of course.” Lucy smirked.

A heavy silence stretched out between them.“Thank you. You saved our asses back there.” Alex said eventually.

Lucy nodded. “Don't mention it. We would have been there sooner but we had our own problems.”

Alex pursed her lips. “Understood. We…we lost one.”

Lucy grimaced in sympathy. “I'm sorry to hear it.”

In unison, Alex and Vasquez nodded. “Well, thank you for the rescue.”

Lucy snorted. “You're very welcome but this is not a rescue mission. Not as such.”

At the other women’s confused expressions, Lucy continued. “I’m sure you've noticed that the comms are completely down. We can get perfect signal outside, but the second you step over the threshold from no-man's land into the Q zone, zilch. We can't contact your lot, our teams, nothing. Even civilian telephones are out of action. We’re here blind, trying to contact as many of the surviving crews out in the field as we can before midnight.”

“What's at midnight?” Vasquez asked. “M’am.” She added self consciously.

“That's when Operation Victoria starts. The high command has decided to see this as an opportunity rather than a complete catastrophe. They're going to use the area in and around L Corp to test their new super weapon; it's a way of liquidating all living creatures in a set radius, without damaging the infrastructure.” Lucy had the decency to look disgusted.

“Any living creature… You mean healthy or infected?” Alex asked, her heart rate picking up again.

“Yep, all of them. If you're in the exclusion zone at Midnight, it’ll be goodnight Vienna, whether you’re rabid or not.” Lucy grimaced. “I managed to convince them to put the go-time back to 12 to let us get the word out as far as possible, on the proviso that I lead the team myself.”

“That was very brave of you.” Alex said honestly.

Lucy stared at her. “We’re against the wall here Alex. Bravery has nothing to do with it. I know it's no use trying to convince you to leave right now, but I'll only tell you this once - get yourself and that wife of yours on the other side of the barricade in the next 4 hours. No matter what.”

Alex nodded, in spite of everything feeling amused that the youngest Lane had guessed why she was still hanging about. Lucy turned to Vasquez.

“You're more than welcome to come with us when we head out Agent. The more the merrier.”

Vasquez side eyed her superior. “Thank you m’am, but I'm going to stay with my remaining team.”

Alex looked surprised but didn't argue. In honesty, the idea of being alone in the chaos surrounding them was terrible; she felt overwhelmed with gratitude to the slight Latina stood next to her.

Lucy nodded and stood fully up. “Well then, ladies. We’re heading out again in 15 minutes. We haven't got much to spare but we’ll top up your canteens and leave you a spare clip each.” The major held out her hand. Alex clasped it tightly.

“Goodbye, Lucy. If we get out of this, I owe you a beer.”

Lucy laughed as she shook Vasquez’s hand. “More than one I think, Danvers. Good luck.”

“And to you.”  
As the door closed behind them, Vasquez turned to Alex. “What's the plan then?”Alex put her hand on her hips, eyes on her boots. When she looked up again, it was with brown eyes filled with fire.

“We get ourselves to L Corp. Like, right now.”


	8. Chapter 8

The 20th floor was made up of a small open plan office area surrounding the central column of the elevator shaft. Behind this were several smaller units, designed to be hired out individually as labs or workshops to other enterprises. From here, they would have access to a proportion of the tech and resources that made L Corp so successful. For the larger corporation, it was a veritable mine of innovation, and, for those start-ups which couldn't turn hard work into gold, it was at least a way to use up empty floor space and make sure the L Corp building could remain the largest and most bustling building in National City.

The entire floor was dark now, the automatic lights apparently off; the only illumination came from one of the rental units at the far end, the warm glow flooding from an open door. The small man, who had introduced himself as Dr. Wallace Woolf, led Lena’s group towards the room, never stopping talking in a mildly annoying dead pan voice.

“Of course you wouldn't know me, Lena Luthor, but I was very close with your brother before all that nastiness happened. Sickening, the way the world turned on him. We had great plans, he and I, although in the end, he was just another tremendous disappointment. Even the great Lex Luthor’s vision extended only so far.”

As he talked, Lena watched Wallace closely. He was a short, slightly over weight man, with searing blue eyes that rarely blinked. He was the sort of man who pronounced ‘disappointment’ as if it was the dirtiest thing you could hope to be, and despite his deadpan voice, grandiose hand gestures punctuated his incessant talking. He had a tick in the form of a constant swiping at the underside of his nose. Something about him gave Lena the creeps.

“So how did you get stuck up here?” Amy interrupted. Wallace scowled at her.

“I didn't get stuck up here. This is my base of operations. The floor plate was completely empty, I designed it just so. Unfortunately a group of survivors decided this would be a good place to escape the infected on the stairs. One of them must have been bitten, and after that things got a little more complicated.”

“You mean you got trapped.” Amy said helpfully. Wallace ignored her.

Entering the unit, Lena stopped short. It was one of the larger break outs available on this floor, and had been turned into an impressive laboratory. Every counter top held the newest and most advanced equipment that was being used in current virology. Even Lena could barely recognise half of it. The far wall was covered in monitors, all showing different pictures. Squinting, she could just make out the reception of L Corp, a street that look like Cordova Street under the detritus, and, alarmingly, her office. In front of the wall of pixels sat a computer, or more specifically 3 different computers which appeared to be joined by enough cables to wire a small house.

“What is this place?” Lena asked in awe. Wallace smiled proudly.

“This is my brainchild, the beating heart of Project Liberation. From here, I can see everything happening within both L Corp and National City, and react accordingly. From this room, I am both omnipotent and omnipresent.”

The women took this in with a growing sense of unease. Eventually, Sue broke the silence. “What did you mean when you said you’d designed the floor plate to be empty?” She asked slowly, her eyes travelling to her boss.

Wallace beamed smugly. “Did you think all this was just an accident? A mishap down in the labs? Silly girl.”

Lena looked from him to the multiple screens. Several showed scenes of the destruction caused when society broke down, and, faced with sheer unescapeable horror, people panicked: upturned cars, small fires, smashed windows and broken bodies. Entire floors of L Corp appeared to be inhabited solely by the infected, milling around aimlessly, fighting over scraps of God-knows-what, and in some instances clustering in raucous groups around locked doors or cupboards. In the top right hand corner, a flash of movement caught her eye: a woman was running away from a wrecked car, dragging behind her a small child of maybe 7 or 8. The child was struggling to keep up with it's carer. The woman tried to pick the child up, staggered a few steps under the weight, and went back to dragging the little figure down the street. From out of the side streets and open doors came sprinting figures. One by one, each direction of escape was closed off. Lena looked away when the woman hugged the child to her, unwilling to watch what came next.

“I don't understand.” The CEO said in a shallow voice.

Wallace laughed, an unkind, mirthless sound.  
“Do you know who I am Ms. Luthor?” He asked. She shook her head. “I have worked for this company for my entire working life, working tirelessly in the field of virology, trying to cure the many illnesses that plague the human race, excuse the pun. I have sacrificed my life to the betterment of my race. The human race, not the alien race, not these other species that bleeding heart liberals like you now tell me I have to accept. Your brother was a great man, he understood that there is only enough on this planet for either us, or them.” Wallace gestured vaguely towards Lindsey, who looked distinctly uncomfortable. “And then he was gone and you took over, with your absurd ideas about ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’, hiring from this race or that species, as if everyone was just as good as each other. It was only to be expected I suppose from your kind.” He spat the last words, barely restrained anger lacing every syllable. “A disgusting alien loving queer.”

Lena narrowed her eyes at this, but didn't flinch. This was nothing new. As an out and proud bi woman, she’d heard it all even before instituting several multi-spectrum I&D policies. For nearly a decade, L Corp had been held up as the gold standard of an inclusive employer, regardless of whether the diversity of their staff was related to sexuality, gender, earth race or species. You couldn't make an omelet without cracking a few bigoted eggs, she was fond of saying. Next to her however, Amy audibly gasped, and Sue tightened her grip on the metal pole. Haifa looked bewildered.

“I could write all that off. I could stand having to pass these…creatures…in the corridors, having to sit next to them in the cafeteria even. But that wasn't enough for you, was it? You had to humiliate me totally. When you appointed one of those freaks as my new assistant, I knew it was time to bring some of my old research out of storage. I alone am the bastion of the future of the human race.”

Lena regarded him silently, eyebrow raised, until the man began, against his will, to fidget uncomfortably. “Just to make sure I understand,” she said eventually “are you racist, speciesist, homophobic, a religious bigot, or all of the above?”

Wallace sneered. “Word, only words. Why don't you ask Dr Sarapo there?”

Lena turned to where Lindsey was pressing herself further into the corner. One hand was clamped in her thick grey hair, and silent tears were rolling down her cheeks.

“Talk to me Lindsey.” Lena said in an even voice.

Lindsey’s eyes were wild, looking every where but at her employer. Sue stepped forward, but made no move to comfort the older woman.

“He told me he’d kill her if I didn't do it!” Lindsey cried.

Lena groaned, hand covering her eyes. “He’d kill who if you didn't do what?”

“My granddaughter, Shelley. She applied under the Other World hiring programme, and got assigned to Dr Woolf. I got her the god damn interview, I encouraged her from when she was your daughter’s age, and he told me he’d kill her if I didn't get him the money!”

“Fucking hell!” Sue shouted, exasperated, throwing the metal pole onto a lab bench.

“You siphoned off money from the budget to fund his research.” Lena stated. Lindsey collapsed into a crouch, hands on her head.

“I didn't know he was doing this, I thought it was just blackmail!”

Wallace gestured at the glistening array of machinery. “Decent research doesn't come cheap, and it wasn't like I could carry on in the lab, not with Ms Sarapo watching over me.”

“Where is Shelley now?”

For the first time, a flicker of doubt spread across the doctor’s face. “The disease was engineered to infect aliens only. I had intended for it to be released over a wide area at an appropriate time, once I was sure that it would have no negative effects on the human population. But today, when I heard about your little discussion with Dr. Sarapo, I knew the game was up. I needed an alien host to carry the disease and quickly.” He said.

Lindsey looked up sharply. “Where is Shelley, Wallace?”

“She…she didn't suffer, not really. The dose I gave her was so large that she turned in seconds.”

In a flash, Lindsey had her hands around the man's thick neck, squeezing as tightly as her thin grip would allow. Haifa and Sue pulled her off, pushing her back across the lab. The older woman launched herself forward again, only to be stopped when Sue pulled her into a tight bear hug. Lindsey struggled for a moment, then collapsed into a flood of tears.

“You infected her because she was an alien” Lena clarified, scarcely able to believe what she was saying, "and then you set her loose on the rest of the building.”

Wallace held up his hands as if realising he was out of his depth. “Not technically! I infected her, yes, but then I locked her in the lab! It was one of the technicians who let her out!”

“Do you have any idea, any idea at all, how many people you’ve killed today?” Lena stepped forward, slowly.

“It wasn't meant to affect people! Only aliens!” Wallace said shrilly, glancing between Lena, Haifa and Amy, who were slowly surrounding him on three sides.

“Aliens are people you sick fuck!” Lena shouted. The small man cringed back at the noise.

“We should throw him down the lift shaft.” Amy said decisively.

“We…what?” Lena asked, struggling to keep up with how fast everything was moving.

Amy shrugged. “He doesn't deserve to get out of this, not when he has killed god knows how many people.” Sue murmured agreement.

“No, we aren't going to kill him. We can't do that.” Haifa said, her voice unwavering in conviction. The other women turned to look at her.

“Does your religion tell you that?” Amy asked with the hint of an uncharacteristic sneer.

Haifa shrugged. “Yes, partly. But also, if we just do that, if we just execute him, it might feel good for a little while, but then once we’re out…we’ll know what we did. I don’t want to live with that, and I don't want you to either. It's different with the sick people. It's kill or be killed. But killing him would just be revenge.”

“So what, we take him with us?”

“No.” Haifa’s eyes turned unexpectedly cold. “We don’t. We leave him right here. We leave him here with no weapons, no supplies, nothing. The people out there died terrified, fighting for every second. If he wants to live, he should experience that too. No special treatment. No favours at the end of the world.”

The quiet that followed was nuanced by Lindsey’s quiet sobbing, and the sound of Wallace’s hyperventilation.

“Geez Haifa, that's cold.” Amy said eventually, a hint of approval in her voice.

Lena looked between the 5 other people in the room. Her eyes lit on the flickering TV screen behind Wallace’s head, where what was left of the mother had begun to drag herself along the tarmac. There was no sign of the child.

“I think we should let Lindsey decide.” Sue suggested.

Lindsey looked up at the sound of her name. Her eyes were a dark sheen and red rimmed from heartfelt tears. She stood up straighter, extricating herself from the younger woman's embrace.

“He doesn't deserve to dirty our hands.”

Lena wanted to argue, she really did. She wanted to stand up for the monster currently looking utterly panicked across from her. No matter what he had done, she wanted to say, he is still a living, healthy human being, and if we leave him here, then it's no less of a death sentence than shoving him bodily down the elevator shaft. But she couldn't. The words stilled and turned stale on her tongue, each one washed away by the image of David, the mother on the CCTV screen, Jenny’s breaking leg, and every single head she’d had to smash that afternoon. Wallace Woolf had made her lock down her humanity just to get this far, and now the time came to dig into the empathy barrel, Lena found it completely empty.

Lena nodded slowly, carefully. “Ok. This is your…lucky…day, Dr Woolf.”

Sue snatched the gun out of the man's unresisting hand.

“You….you can't leave me here!” He squeaked, visibly shaking now.

“There aren't any provisions. No food, no water, nothing.” Amy was busily opening drawers and checking under counters. “You didn't plan this very well at all, did you?”

>

Lena wondered how over-confident the man must have been to have not even stocked up on emergency provisions.

“You can't leave me here.” Wallace repeated, firmer this time. He was roundly ignored.

“We’ll search the rest of the floor, but no matter what we’re leaving in 15 minutes. I just want out now, before things can get any worse.” Lena ordered. There was a general murmur of agreement, followed by a flurry of activity. Lindsey wiped her eyes, giving the other doctor one last hate-filled look, before exiting.

Lena herself went to the furthest end of the floor, checking the smaller units. They were all, as Wallace had said, empty of people. It seemed most of the units had been stripped bare over the past weeks and months, presumably as Wallace used his pilfered funds to buy the tenants out. She found a couple of bottles of water and a bag of chips; the other women came up with less than that.

13 minutes later, having shared the water and chips, the women were stood next to the open shaft, once again staring into the darkness. None of them were massively keen on getting back on the ladder, but a perfunctory listen across the deserted floor told them that the stairwells were still riddled with monsters. At the far end of the office, a thumping could be heard as the infected, alerted by the increased activity inside, had begun knocking to get in.

“Ok, second time lucky.” Lena said with a false chuckle, securing the metal pole to her abdomen with a ratchet strap that she'd found in one of the abandoned units.

“Wait! Wait! You can't leave me here!” Wallace had spent the past quarter of an hour trailing Lena around mutely, apparently having identified her as the weak link, but he hadn't spoken in all that time.

Lena gave an irritated sigh. “I think you'll find we can. You have no value to us. You should just be grateful we’re leaving you alive.”

Wallace brought himself up to his full height, which was an inch shorter than Lena even in her stockinged feet. “You are going to get me out of here, and in one functional piece, Ms. Luthor.”

Lena looked at him blankly.

“If you have any hope of reversing what is happening here, I am It. Do you think that I would create such a malignant disease and not think to create an antivirus?”

The women looked at each other.

“You're lying!” Sue all but shouted. “A man who doesn't even stock up on drinking water isn't the sort of man to bother with back up plans!”

Lena looked between Wallace and her Assistant. She knew that Sue was right. Knew in her bones that Wallace Woolf wouldn't have even considered a cure or a vaccine. His unfathomable pride at what he was doing would have cancelled out any foreboding a rational person might have felt. But a niggle in the back of her mind whispered: ‘Would you bet your life on it? How about the lives of the two thousand people in this building?’ Lena opened her mouth to speak, wanting at least to get some semblance of her confusion out in the open, but Lindsey cut her off.

“He's right.” Wallace looked smug. “Look, I hate him more than anyone. My granddaughter, Shelley, was a wonderful woman. She was going to change the world. But he…if he has got a cure, he could save the lives of thousands of people. Maybe not everyone, but more than just the six of us at least. He could save my granddaughter.”

Amy blew her cheeks out in a loud huff.

“Did you write the cure down?” Haifa asked hopefully, already knowing the answer.

“Madam, I am a genius, I don't need to write it down.”

Lena sighed. “Get him a weapon. Not the gun. Dr Woolf, if you're messing us about, I will end you myself.” Sue handed the man the piece of table leg that she’d been using as a club, holding onto it for a second too long, and then shouldered the shotgun on its leather strap.

Lena turned to leave, easing herself out into the precipice.

“Not that.”

Pushing herself back onto solid ground, she turned to see Wallace pointing his pudgy finger at Lindsey. “Excuse me?”

“That can't come with us, it isn't safe. Either it stays or I stay, and I guarantee that you need me more that that thing.”

Lena hissed through her teeth. “That thing is a woman; I don't care if she's an alien or as human as me, she's worth ten of-“

“I'll stay.” Lindsey said quietly, nodding her head as if making a firm decision. “It's ok. I'll stay. Not just for him. I'm going to see if I can find Shelley on the CCTV, maybe I'll be able to get to her and keep her safe. Until the cure is ready.”

“Lindsey-“ Amy began, but the grey haired doctor hushed her with a wave of her hand.

“I'm sorry I won't be able to help you to get out. But I know you'll do it. You're the strongest people I've had the fortune to meet, on this world or any other. And I'm…i’m just so sorry. If I don't make it out, you tell my husband and my son that, that I'm sorry, ok? I only wanted to protect my family.”

Lena felt a lump forming in ver throat, but held the tears back. There would be time for crying later.

Lindsey hugged her four comrades, one by one. Sue had to by physically prised away from her. The young woman had formed an attachment to the female doctor in the midst of the chaos, and for a few moments Lena worried that she might choose to stay at her side. In the end though, the butch woman stepped back, tears making her eyes swollen.

As Lena hugged her colleague, she whispered in her ear, “you were always the strongest Luthor. You see things that none of the others could. Don't you dare give up, Lena Danvers-Luthor.”

Lena nodded, pressing the alien’s warm hands to her heart for a long moment. As before, the CEO climbed first into the pitch black. She was unwilling to look again at Lindsey Sarapo. From the further end of the floor, the droning, thumping, caterwauling of the infected hordes continued.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that this one was a bit wordy, I thought it was time to move the plot on a bit...hopefully it wasn't too dull. More head smashing zombie fighting to come, I promise.


	9. Chapter 9

The street outside L Corp was lit up like midday by the numerous lamp posts that lined the pavements on either side. By the glow, Alex Danvers-Luthor could see all too clearly the carnage that had been wrought here. She had her forehead pressed up against the glass of the high brow wine bar that they’d broken into in the search for a decent, unoccupied vantage point; behind the bar itself was the slowly cooling body of the rabid barman who had surprised Vasquez when they first arrived. Looking left and right, Alex saw that the road seemed to be empty of humans and infected alike, both drawn away into the surrounding buildings and towards the Q zone’s perimeter, in search of safety and meat respectively. Even the snipers, stationed on the nearest roof tops after the first escapees from ground zero, had disappeared.

The agent looked at her colleague. Vasquez had her eyes scrunched up as if in thought. She hadn't spoken since they'd watched Lucy’s squad head out into the night, not even after she’d used the butt of her M4 to cave the barman’s face inside out. Alex was worrying that she’d had second thoughts.

“What do you say then, Vasquez?”

The other woman puffed her cheeks out slightly and bobbed her head. “I say that we’re looking at a building locked up tight enough to keep nearly 2000 people, all crazy with fever, trapped inside. That it's entirely built of sheer glass walls, without so much as a water spout running up the outside, with only one evident entrance, a balcony on the fourth floor - a floor which, if we do get that far, is likely to be riddled with flesh-hungry cannibals.” Alex opened her mouth to respond, but Susan continued. “And looking at the invitingly empty street outside, I'll wager that every nook and cranny is going to be jam packed with infected, because that's just our fucking luck. The second we step onto the street out front, if we don't play our cards right, we’ll get shanked right in the ass. Add to that, we have no idea what floor your wife is on, or if she's even….well, we haven't got a clue where to start. And we have about 3 hours and 17 minutes left until every living thing inside and out gets snotted by our own side.”

“We always did love a challenge.” Alex quipped half-heartedly. Vasquez snorted.

“So, given all that, what's the plan, M’am?”

Alex ran her hand through her hair. It snagged on the mass of tangles, a physical reminder of the painful day. “We’ve got the window cleaner’s MEWP, we could jump in that, give us a boost?”

“Down 4 floors and back up 4 floors without getting swamped?” Vasquez asked sceptically.

“Better than being at ground level forever.” Under the Latina’s gaze, Alex raised her hands in supplication. “Ok, ok. The roof? If we could string something across from the block next door, we could shimmy across and then make our way down through the building.”

Vasquez raised her eyebrows. “M’am, with all due respect, that's 30 plus floors of shit.”

“What do you suggest then agent? Because my wife is in that building, potentially alone by now, and she has no idea that time is running out. I'm getting in one fucking way or the other.” Alex snapped angrily. Vasquez put a soothing hand on her superior’s shoulder and squeezed.

“We’re going to get her out, Alex, or die trying. I'd just rather do the former than the latter.”

Alex took a calming breath, and began pacing. “So what are our options here?”

“We could use the MEWP, but that would almost certainly get us eaten, in which case we’d have also removed Lena’s only means of escape.”

“Right, what else?”

“We could go in via the roof, but it's incredibly unlikely that we’d make in to floor 4 in time, even if that is where Lena is.”

“Ok. Options. Options.”

Vasquez bit her thumb pensively. “We could go in through the ground floor.”

Alex stopped walking and looked at her comrade, unblinking. “I know it sounds kind of crazy.”

“It sounds a lot crazy, and I am genuinely all ears.”

..............................................

Stepping out into the street, Alex tried to control her own heart beat. Nothing stirred, not so much as a rat running down an alleyway. The air was smoky, with an undertone of something akin to decay lacing every lungful they took. She listened intently, and, hearing only silence, gestured to Vasquez to advance. They side stepped across the open terrain, moving around abandoned vehicles and the remnants of body parts, oozing thickening globules of red onto the black-top. They didn't hurry, having learned well enough that taking the time to assess their surroundings was more beneficial than getting there quickly. Down the street, Alex thought she saw movement, a figure her brain told her, and her heart stopped. Ducking behind an SUV with smoke pouring from under the bonnet, she gave the other agent the hand signal to stop and drop. Squinting round the wheel arch, she looked back down the street, but the shadow had disappeared. Alex wondered if it had been there at all, or if it was stress playing mind games.

They reached the small plaza in front of L Corp’s main entrance unhindered, and followed the line of the foundations to the quieter side street on the east wing. The entire ground floor of the building had been boarded up with hastily erected plywood hoarding, sealed firmly in place with inch-thick iron bolts.

They stopped half way down the eastern edge, where Alex had estimated the executive conference suites should be, hoping that the mass of infected that they’d heard smacking against the hoarding from inside the lobby area would have ignored the quieter, closed off meeting rooms set behind the main reception. Alex bent down into a squat, her back pressed firmly into the cheap wood. Vasquez pulled out the DEO equivalent of a Swiss Army knife, selected the Phillips screw driver, and, using the other agent as a boost, got to work on the highest set of securing bolts. They were solid, and had been drilled in mechanically. Vasquez was having to grind all her strength behind the tool just to get the first one to move slightly, and Alex could feel it in her collarbone where the younger woman's size 6 boot rested.

She’d scrunched up her eyes by the time Vasquez was on the third bolt, desperate not to complain or show any sign of agony, to just get the job done and get inside, and that was why the roar took her by surprise.

It was a deep throated, gut wrenching roar, the kind primordial man probably heard just before everything went dark, and when Alex opened her eyes, she saw why. About 200 yards away, standing bold as brass in the middle of the street, was a 6’9” Khund weighing, if Alex was to guess, 280 pounds in raw, rippling muscle. It was a male, judging by the prominent ceremonial scarring around the traditional eye piece, wearing the remnants of leather biker trousers that had been torn open down one leg. It's chest was bare, and, alarmingly, it had lost an arm. The remaining stump stopped at the bicep, and was dribbling blackish blood onto the pink skin of the Khund’s torso. Vasquez hopped down, not looking up as she started on the bolts on the left hand side of the board.

“H’okay, I've got this. You…do that.” Alex reached into her belt and pulled out the thin knife stick; any inclination she may have had to fire her gun disappeared as she caught movement in her peripheral vision. The alleys and doorways around her were coming to life. It was unnerving that the zombie-things seemed loathe to attack while the massive alien was in the mix, and she wondered if the infected who still hadn't been slaughtered were the smarter ones, the ones who still retained something of their pre-virus selves. It was an uncomfortable thought, and one she couldn't afford to dwell on at that moment.

The gargantuan had started running now, a slow, lumbering pace that resembled a juggernaut gearing up. Alex picked up her feet to meet it, weaving through the debris on nimble legs that her counterpart couldn't hope to match. They were about 10 feet apart when Alex felt everything else melt away. 

This was what she knew, what she understood; she was her best self in the seconds before and the minutes during a fight, when all other thoughts either vanished or got your ass handed to you. The agent had tried to explain to Lena repeatedly how it felt, how good it felt to completely release your inhibitions, to give over control to nothing but your animal instincts and the snap of your fascia, but the CEO hadn't really ‘gotten it’. Lena fought continuously with her brain cranked up to 11; in Alex’s line of work, that could get you killed.

In front of her was a Smart Car, the front end pointing towards downtown, the windscreen pushed in in an almost perfectly human sized hole. Without slowing a step, she tacked onto the bonnet, using the upward momentum to launch her much smaller frame at the infected Khund. It swiped at her with its remaining arm, a lazy, slow arc that she easily managed mid-air to pivot over. As she sailed over its meaty shoulder, her hand reached out dreamlike, and with all the force and momentum that a 130 pound body moving at maximum velocity can exert, jammed the sharp end of the knife stick into the beast’s eyeball. Landing into a roll, she sprung to her feet triumphant.

The Khund wobbled, then turned around slowly, a couple of inches of the metal still jutting out of its eye socket, and roared again. Alex glanced around the hulking body to where Vasquez was diligently working at the bolts in a flat footed crouch. The top of the board was leaning away from the windows now, but with the Khund distracted, the infected that had been drawn by the fuss had begun to stealthily creep towards the disregarded prey. As she watched, Vasquez swivelled almost calmly on her heels and stabbed a boy of about 17 through the temple with the screwdriver. Then, as soon as he slumped, she pulled the implement out of the damaged skull and went back to work.

A whistling alerted Alex to the first blow, and she ducked as a frying-pan sized fist went over her head. She pirouetted sideways, but the Khund’s thick body was already lunging forwards. There was the cold metal of a 4x4 at her back, one of those gas guzzling urban tanks that Lena had refused to even consider, and in a micro-second of cognisance, Alex realised that she was going to be trapped between the vehicle and the hammy carcass with its eager gnashing teeth. Reaching for her side arm, poised to fight to the last ounce of life, despite knowing, knowing in the back of her mind that it was too late for that, she almost missed the shadow leaping over the car behind her. 

It hit the drooling Khund square in the chest, a flash of silver and black and swirling blades. Alex dropped to her belly, rolled under the car, and immediately out the other side. Still in a crouch, she edged to peer round the radiator.

The huge body of the infected lay on the floor; its head was several feet away. The shadow standing over the corpse reached out a hand, and said in a distorted electronic voice, “Time to go Alex, we aren't making any friends here!”

Batting the hand away, Alex hurtled to where Vasquez was using a razor thin tungsten knife to prize the newly-revealed window seal open. The butch woman looked up and froze as her superior sprinted towards her, head down, and only breathed again when the other woman tackled the infected woman in a dowdy night dress who had crept up behind.

“Bingo!” Vasquez yelled, yanking the window as far open as it would go, while simultaneously dodging out of reach of the flailing, grasping, putrefying arms that never came.

Rolling inside in an ungainly belly vault, Alex reached to grab the window handle, slamming the heavy frame shut on the quick fingers that had just clamped on the sill.

The three people now safe in the deserted conference room slumped to the floor, panting exhausted breaths.

“I…thought…you…were in…Guatemala?” Alex asked eventually.

Guardian pulled the constrictive mask off to get more air to his sweat drenched face. “Yeah, well Kal-El thought you could use some help.” James waved at her dismissively. “Don't worry, he dropped me off like 10 miles away and flew straight back to Lois. Kara was worried, apparently Winn thinks L Corp of the epicentre of all of this.” He gestured vaguely to reference the utter destructive shit-storm going on around them.

Alex shrugged. “My sister and her cousin, I have never been more grateful that they don't listen to a damn word I say.”

James chuckled quietly. As the group’s heart rates settled down and blood stopped deafening their ears, the noises from outside the large-ish room became more apparent. Constant and unrelenting was the noise of smashing and screaming and hammering that drifted through the closed door and shuttered windows. Alex crawled on hands and knees over to the strip of glass that ran the length of the room, facing L Corp’s impressive lobby. She closed one eye, and pressed the other to a gap in the blinds.

People stood or scrambled or lay on every surface. Where there wasn't any free space, such as near the front doors, they climbed and slithered over each other like snakes. The revolving doors themselves were completely blocked from view, but Alex imagined that no one would be getting out that way with the twisted mash of bodies no doubt clogging the mechanism. As she watched, a wave of three or four bodies fell from one of the railings that surrounded the atrium up to the fifth floor, making a hideous bone crunching sound. None of the other infected paid it any attention.

Alex crawled back to Vasquez and Guardian. “Well crew,” she whispered softly, “we sure as hell aren't going out that way. It's like Grand Central station on Christmas Eve out there, but with fucking Zombies.”

James half smirked and half frowned. “Winn would be over joyed to hear you say that, he's been really upset that we aren't calling them zombies.”

Vasquez touched the other woman's forearm. “M’am, I'm guessing that you spent a lot of time watching geeky old spy movies when you were a kid, same as me?”

Alex nodded, too tired and scared to deny it.

“Well,” Vasquez said, pointing the toe of her steel capped boot at a grate set a little way down the wall, “how about a classic?”


	10. Chapter 10

The corridor as glimpsed through the little 2 inch wide crack in the metal doors appeared deserted. The lights were on, though, and they all knew by now that meant trouble.

Lena shuffled up the ladder to let Amy have another look. Casting her eyes downwards, she was met with Haifa and Sue’s resigned grimaces, and the terrified wide eyed panic that had been on Wallace Wollf’s round face since the suggestion that they throw him down the elevator shaft.

“You’re right, it does look clear.” Amy whispered after a minute of agonising silence.

“Right. I'm going to go first, see what's actually going on out there.” Lena said with resolve.

Sue put her hand on Lena’s naked ankle where it stood at eye height. The EA had shed her shirt and now stood in an off-white tank top that had revealed surprisingly muscular biceps bulging under her ebony skin. To Lena, those muscles felt distinctly reassuring. “Do you want me to go?”

Lena shook her head. “No need, love. Just give me a tick.”

Amy helped her wedge the doors open a couple more feet. They were stiffer than the ones on the higher floors, and Lena had a moment of agony when she thought they were making too much noise, but they slid apart the final few inches on well greased rollers, finally open enough to let her wriggle through.

The corridor was brightly lit but apparently empty. There was evidence everywhere of the initial skirmish that Haifa had described; blood smeared and spattered on the magnolia walls, lumps lying everywhere of nameless human parts, mostly chewed beyond recognition. To the right, the corridor was lined with training classrooms, spacious computing suites, libraries for sciences, engineering, architecture, and the hundred other disciplines that L Corp dabbled in. These flowed all the way round to the far side of the building. The corridor framed an impressive view over the main atrium of L Corp, but the elevators were fortuitously hidden by the wall of the spacious cafeteria, that was packed most days with students and apprentices, drawn in because while the food in this restaurant may have been of poorer quality than the main restaurant at ground level, the prices were considerably cheaper.

She listened till her ears buzzed, but the only noise that Lena could hear was a muted shuffling from the open canteen doorway, about 20 feet to her left. It was underpinned by an almost constant clicking sound that made her think uncomfortably of insects, and the occasional soft groan.

Lena crawled as far as the end of the canteen wall and peered gingerly round the edge. On the far side, over the wide gap, she could see a few figures milling about, most standing in wobbly stasis. They didn't look her way. The restaurant took up the entire side of the building, with a thin corridor on either side which ended in floor-to-ceiling windows of smoked glass, and although it would be possible to get to the balcony from either direction, it was impossible to do so without going through the room itself or risking a horrendous climb out of those impressive windows. Risking a glance down, Lena had to bite back a gasp. The entire ground floor was a seething mess of bodies, covering every surface like a dingy carpet. The infected had piled up against the main doors like a snow drift, no doubt crushing to pulp the people on the bottom tiers. On the floors between her and that mess, every floor seemed to be packed with ever decreasing packs of rabid workers. Every now and then, the crush would get too much and one or two bodies would tumble from the upper echelons onto the filthy floor below. Lena thanked her lucky stars that this floor seemed clearer.

Hugging the wall, Lena moved back along the corridor, giving Amy an optimistic thumbs up, before continuing on to the big double doors of the canteen that were standing ajar. She was almost on top of the threshold when she saw what was holding the doors open. The restaurant was packed with bodies, hugging together as if they were penguins at the South Pole. There were so many infected that they’d managed to force the doors open, the last three people standing almost in the corridor, facing inwards. Lena baulked, trying desperately to regulate her breathing to barely a tremor in her chest.

She crawled back to where her team were still hiding in the shadows by tortuously slow inches, and when she got there, eased herself feet first over the sill and onto the ladder.

Amy went to speak but Lena clamped her hand over the woman's mouth, exaggeratedly shaking her head. She gestured for the team to move back up the ladder slightly so that they could talk.

“We aren't going to be able to go the way we’d planned. The restaurant is a bit…busy.”

Haifa rubbed her eyes. “How busy is busy?”

Lena paused. “It's like Grand Central station on Christmas Eve.”

Sue put her hand over mouth, massaging her lips as if to quell the panic. Wallace looked like he might scream, and Lena had a brief idea of kicking him off the ladder before he could.

“So we go down a level or two, see what we can find.” Amy said with a dismissive shrug of her shoulders.

“We really do not want to do that. I had a look over the lobby, every floor below us is heaving with infected, and they seem a bit more lively than the ones on this floor. We’re just going to have to be quiet as mice, and…”

“And what?” Haifa asked suspiciously, uncovering her eyes and fixing Lena with a hard stare.

“The windows at the end of this corridor have an inset pane that can be opened a little way, to let the air circulate. We’re just going to have to give that a little bit of a nudge, and climb out that way.”

Amy blinked. “A nudge.”

“A quiet nudge.”

The group was silent, each lost in their own thoughts. Lena fancied she could here the incessant clicking the zombie-things seemed to make when not yowling, drifting up through the elevator shaft until it became deafening.

“Shall we just get this shit over with?” Sue spoke abruptly, making Wallace jump alarmingly. “I don't know about you but I'm ready to just get out of this damn building, and drink a pint of gin in the safety of my own bedroom, so let's just crack on, yeah?”

The others nodded their assent with the barest flicker of a grin.

The corridor was still empty. Lena looked back at the other survivors; Haifa had bravely taken up the rear, followed by Sue and then Amy. Wallace had insisted on being immediately behind Lena, figuring that she would be the least likely to feed him to the infected if push came to shove, but had blanched slightly when Amy took up position behind him, the lethal fire extinguisher that she had somehow carried down 29 floors poking him threateningly in the lower back.

They moved as one in a low crouch along the corridor, every step feeling louder than a hammer strike. The noise from the cafeteria remained low, and as they neared the door, Lena eased herself onto the far wall. They were level with the door now, and could see the press of bodies inside; Lena was just stepping out of view on the other side, feeling a surge of hope that they might yet get out of this alive, when the frightened little man behind her let out a subconscious grunt, and shoved her out of the way in his rush to escape.

He tore towards the window, jamming the smaller pane as far as it would go, and then stood back to give it an almighty kick.

The infected shrieked, all at once, and tried to turn to face the prey now cowering in the corridor outside. The crush slowed them down though, just enough to let Lena race after Wallace, grabbing him by the scruff of his shirt and dragging him down an offshoot corridor. Wallace was gibbering now, and Lena managed to get a solid slap across his face before hauling him through the door on the left. To her relief, it was unlocked, and it was only when they got inside that she realised that they were in the women's lavatories. The rest of their group were no where to be seen, but the sound of feet outside put pay to any thoughts of search and rescue. Lena shoved the doctor into the nearest cubicle, and pushed him up and onto the cistern of the toilet. She herself hurriedly locked the door and climbed onto the seat, making sure that neither of their feet would be seen by anyone enterprising enough to look under the stall. She rammed a clammy hand over Wallace's mouth just as the door slammed open.

The infected were going nuts, thwacking their palms and feet off the sinks, walls, and the rickety stalls. Lena winced with every judder of the wood and every rattle of the flimsy bolt. The screaming was almost unbearably loud. Wallace was shaking, pressed up close against her body. She could smell his cologne, augmented with sweat, and something else, an unpleasant pungent stink. He'd pissed himself, she realised.

Desperately, the youngest Luthor wracked her brain for some way out of this, some loop hole that might let them live just a little bit longer, but there was nothing. Without a miracle, she was going to perish here, less that 20 feet from their goal, with no one to know how close they'd come except a despicable, murdering coward. It was a smidgen of comfort that he was also going to die, but only a very little.

So Lena did something she hadn't done since she was brought to America as a child. She shut her eyes tight, and prayed for a miracle, for one more chance.

In the main part of the bathroom, there were 2 thumps, one after the other. The screaming took on a new cadence; more of a growling, snarling, than a hysterical shriek. Then it started to die down, slowly, until there was just silence and the sound of…panting? Lena looked at the floor, where a steady puddle of blood was oozing under the stall door.

“You can come out now, but please be quiet about it.” A voice whispered very close to the toilet door.

In her delirium, the voice sounded familiar, and Lena’s heart ached because she knew it could only be cruel mental trickery. Nevertheless, she stood slowly, easing away from the terrified Wallace, and very carefully slid the bolt back.

The door creaked slightly as it opened, and then silence as both parties regarded each other.

“…A-Alex?”

................................................. 

As they shimmied up the air vent, feet, back and hands screaming as they were braced for stability, Vasquez couldn't help but feel salty about how damn clean the pipes and vents that the spies and action heroes on TV crawled through were. The actual reality, now she was about 3 floors up, was that the inside of the vent was downright grim. It was damp from condensation, and every surface was covered in a thin film of muddy slime. For a cold metal tube, there was an unfair amount of cobwebs.

At every intersection, they'd have to twist to stand on the thin ledge of the off-shoot, and wedge themselves in again on the other side before they could continue. There had been a couple of dicey moments when one or the other had lost concentration or hit a particularly greasy patch and slipped; it wasn't much of a stretch to imagine what would happen if they actually did fall, crunched up in a tiny cavity like this. Maybe, Vasquez thought sourly, you wouldn't even get to end up mangled on the ground 30 feet below; maybe you'd just end up getting stuck until you starved to death.

Her mood wasn't being helped by the sounds, the awful, mind-numbing sounds, that rattled down the pipe, being amplified as they richochetted off the steel: screaming, growling, crying, and that endless fucking clicking.

When the threesome reached the aperture that meant they were at the fourth floor, the petite Latina felt nothing but joy. She wasn't sure if she could remember how her legs should feel after the agonising climb, but as she scrambled in on her belly, stretching out all those muscles, she grinned hugely. Wriggling along like this was easier. It was trying to work out where on the floor they were solely by the view out of the small grates set evenly along the pipe that was tough. Every now and then, Alex would turn around and whisper “take the next right” or “this left”, and Vasquez followed these instructions without question. It was a relief, truth be told, to just be able to revert to her training and follow simple orders. To not have to think for a while.

This floor seemed quiet. At one point, they thought they heard hushed talking but when they stopped to listen, there was only silence.

“I think this is it.” Alex said, rapping her knuckles on a solid hunk of metal machinery that sat at the end of one stretch. “We push this out, we’ll be right above the balcony. It'll be a quick drop down, and then we’ll be on the home stretch.”

Vasquez nodded, beginning to speak, to ask where they'd start the search for Mrs Danvers-Luthor, when the raucous started. There was distinctly human shouting, followed instantly by the wail of the infected, and, after a few seconds, the slamming of doors. Alex’s face froze.

“Where the fuck is that coming from?” Vasquez asked, turning to look James in the eye. He was already shuffling back, trying to shimmy in the tight space.

“Go back! Go left!” Alex commanded. By the time they reached the grate that was above the epicentre of the palaver, it looked like all hell had broken loose in the corridor below. Zombies were pushing like scared bulls to get through a small gap into where Vasquez guessed that the elevators would be. They were throwing themselves through the inlet, but the elevator never seemed to get full. The noise echoing through the metal vent now was blood curdling, the sound of people with no control left. The team made their way further along following the commotion. When they reached the next grate, they could see five infected, 3 men and 2 women, in what looked like a small bathroom. They were all bleeding profusely from what looked like self inflicted wounds, wounds gained from smashing the mirror, a porcelain sink, and the constant thumping of hands and feet and heads on the locked toilet cubicle. The two women communicated with their eyes alone. Vasquez reached out and slowly, with dexterous fingers, prised free the grate. James looked momentarily horrified, then sighed, lowering his mask again.

Bunched up on the edge of the opening, she took a second to breathe, really and slowly for the first time in hours, and then Vasquez dropped whole down and onto the floor in the middle of the bathroom. Her superior wasn't far behind. The fight was more like a dance in this kind of tight space; she stabbed the nearest woman, who was dribbling blood from her completely smashed front teeth, in the neck with the screwdriver, spinning downwards and ripping out the oesophagus. A hand grabbed her mop of hair and yanked; Vasquez turned, ignoring the pain of tearing hair follicles, and thrust the metal tool upwards and through the gaping jaw of the man leaning in to take a bite.

And then it was over. Alex was standing angrily over two corpses, while James was stamping through the head of an infected woman who had gotten too close. He looked up afterwards and gave a breathless thumbs up. Vasquez moved herself nearer the main door, and, gently so as not to make a noise, leaned her weight against it. The last thing they needed was any uninvited guests.

Alex approached the locked cubicle. “You can come out now, but please be quiet about it.”

It took a few seconds for the door to open. When it did, it was to reveal a very young looking, very scared woman, and a man who was huddled on top of the cistern sobbing.

“A-Alex?”

Susan gawped. The woman standing in front of her was a thousand miles away from the composed, confident, pristine woman she’d met maybe a hundred times. “Mrs Danvers-Luthor!” She hissed.

The CEO started and tore her eyes away from her wife, noticing the other two people for the first time. “You…you’ve passed out drunk on my couch before Susan, I think you can call me Lena now.”

Alex gave a strangled cry and pulled the nonplussed woman into her arms.

“Oh god Alex, you're real.” Tears were welling up in the bright green eyes, and any pretence of an American accent had vanished.

“I found you.” Alex said into her wife's hair. They stood like that for a couple of seconds, before James tapped his watch in their direction. Less that 45 minutes to go.

“Babe, listen to me. We have to go, right now. If we’re within 2 miles of here in like 43 minutes, we’re all going to be toast.”

To her credit, Lena didn't argue, didn't question it, just nodded and reaching back into the stall, dragging out the stricken looking middle aged man.

“This is Wallace Woolf. He says he has a cure for all this. All that matters is that we keep him alive.” She said, her tone a marked change from the bewildered girl of mere moments ago. Wallace made a loud strangled sound. Lena hit him, hard, around the side of the face. “Stop doing that Wallace or I'm going to lose my patience with you.” Turning back to her wife, she nodded. “Ok darling, lets go.”

Getting back up into the vent turned out to be harder than expected. Wallace refused to help himself, and it took Vasquez and James Olsen standing on the floor and pushing, with Alex and Lena pulling from above, to manhandle him all the way up.

As they were catching their breath, Alex asked. “What happened to the others?”

Lena looked up, unable to meet her spouse’s eyes. “Lindsey stayed behind. When we found Wallace. She…I…there were 3 others. When the infected attacked us last time, I didn't have time to save them all. I just grabbed him” she gestured at Wallace, now sat mutely behind her, with a tone of disgust, “and ran in the restroom.”

Alex gently rubbed her wife's shoulder. “You’ve done so good, babe.”

Vasquez heaved herself into the vent, and Alex slid backwards on her belly to give her room. “Lena, these other survivors…how did you get onto this floor?” Vasquez asked with interest.

“We came down the lift shaft. Why?” Lena’s brow was furrowed.

Vasquez grinned over her shoulder at her boss. “I think we have one more stop to make before we get out of dodge.”

.............................................

The shaft was still pitch black, the only light coming from the opening in the elevator doors that showed every now and then a shadow moving passed in the corridor outside. The infected seemed to have stopped trying to hurl themselves into the void after the three women who had made a last grasp at survival through the gap.

“Sue? Amy? Haifa?” Lena whispered hopefully from the air con pipe that opened up just above the doors themselves. There was no answer.

“Sue?” Nothing. “Amy?” Silence. Lena sighed, squeezing her eyes shut. “Haifa?”

“Lena? Where…where are you?” A small, frightened voice came from above.

“Amy? Thank god! Is it just you?”

“Sue and Haifa are here too, Mrs Danvers-Luthor.” Came back Haifa’s Texan drawl.

Lena could have cried with relief. “Come down then, quick as you can! There's another way out, but we have to hurry.”

The clanking of feet on the metal ladder could be heard getting closer, and then Amy’s face became just about visible through the gloom. She was about 5 feet away, on the other side of the elevator doors.

“Lena, am I glad to see you!” She grinned. The grin faded as she took in the distance between the ladder and her employer. “How do we get across?”

Below them, a figure drawn by the voices shoved brazenly through the open doors, before plunging away into the darkness. A muffled thump could be heard, as the body hit the floor 50 feet down.

“Amy, you're going to have to jump. I know it's scary but we’ll catch you.” Lena looked over at Alex where she was squeezed in next to her. She could feel Vasquez and James holding her ankles, wedging their bodies against the smooth metal walls. Wallace sat a way away, staring at them but making no move to help. There was another flicker from below as two more bodies stumbled into the darkness, arms reaching out for the owners of the voices that they couldn't see.

“Shit, Lena.” Amy took a deep breath. “Ok, right. I'm going to count to three, and then I'll jump. I can't see you too good so…just keep talking? So I know where I'm aiming?”

“Of course. Hey when we get out of here-“  
“One.”  
“-we are definitely going to have to talk about the bonus-“  
“Two.”  
“-arrangements, you’ve definitely earned a raise-“  
“Three!”

There was movement in the gloom, and Lena saw hands shooting blindly towards the sound of her voice. She reached out desperately, leaning out her abdomen into the shaft, arms swooping, and then there was the feeling of a perilously tight grip on her forearm and the sound of a body hitting the wall below. Amy's legs clanged off the metal of the door, and for a terrifying second she was slipping out of Lena’s grasp, but then Alex was pulling, hauling the secretary up and into the safety of the vent. She had to climb over the other two women, knees and elbows digging into their shoulders and backs, but finally she was safe, and lay panting and whispering what sounded to Lena’s lapsed ears like the Hail Mary.

“Piece of cake.” The brunette said loudly. “Ok Haifa, lets go.”

...............................................

Man handling the air con unit out of the wall turned out to be more difficult than expected, and it took Vasquez lying on her back and kicking it with all her strength for it to come free, tumbling to the pavement below and smashing several glass windows on the way down.

The agent awkwardly spun back round, grazing her head on the ceiling of the vent, and leaned out into the night air. She could see the balcony below her, mercifully empty of people. Below that, tantalisingly close now, was the window cleaner’s platform. The controls were hanging from their cradle attached the railing. There was a smear of blood running from the centre to the far edge, as if whoever had been on it had been messily scrapped off.

Gingerly, she eased out head first onto the side of the building, hands going white on the sharp bracket that had held the air con unit, her body twisting until she was hanging as low as possible. Then, swallowing a lump of fear, she dropped. She landed with an inch to spare next to the railing, and stayed kneeling, expecting any second to be doused in a flurry of teeth. The door to the cafeteria stayed closed; the mob inside didn't seem to have noticed the intrusion. Looking up, she gave the ‘OK’ signal to Alex, who returned it, and then disappeared from sight. A few seconds later, a pair of smooth, bare legs appeared, followed by a fancy black pencil skirt which was ripped up to the hip on one side. Mrs Danvers-Luthor hung for less than a second before dropping, landing almost silently in her shoeless feet. Vasquez steadied her, and gestured her to the railing.

Leaning over, Lena was able to lower herself, arms shaking, until she was only a metre over the platform. When she landed safely, the MEWP rocking slightly with the impact, Vasquez saw her finally breath again.

Amy came next, and Vasquez was horrified when she all but vaulted over the railing in her excitement at being finally outside, landing heavily. Vasquez ducked down, watching intently over the solid garden furniture to see if any of the zombies remaining in the restaurant had heard, but she didn't see much change to the few rocking figures she could see through the windows.

Haifa hung for a long time, almost until her arms could no longer support her, and Vasquez had to yank her sharply into her body to stop the young woman toppling over the balcony. Once she was safely in the MEWP, Vasquez felt her nervousness soaring again. Wallace was next, and she knew that if this was going to go wrong, it would be because he couldn't keep his shit together.

As the man's fat body was eased out above her, Vasquez felt relieved that she at least couldn't hear him whimpering. James and Alex lowered him slowly until he was almost below the railing, leaning dangerously far out onto the side of the building. Then they dropped him into Vasquez’s waiting arms. The agent had her hand clamped over his mouth before he even hit the floor.

Getting the doctor into the safety of the platform was difficult. The man seemed paralysed with fear, torn between his horror at the shambling figures illuminated by the light inside and the long drop to ground level. It took coaxing and mouthed reassurances from both Vasquez and Lena before he falteringly allowed himself to be helped over the railing and lifted the rest of the way.

Vasquez couldn't believe it. She felt, inside, like they were already home and dry. Guardian was already dropping onto the balcony, and Vasquez could almost taste freedom. She was only half watching his descent, trying to stop the hope showing on her face, and that was why it took a second to register that he’d misjudged the landing. The trajectory had somehow swung his body inwards, towards the building, and as his feet hit the concrete of the balcony they slipped from under his weight, sending a chair clattering noisily into a metal table.

The reaction from inside was instant. Vasquez had less than a second to glance up at her superior’s shocked face before people were pouring out into the balcony, clambering over furniture to get to the dinner standing at the railing.

James and Vasquez jumped at the same time, landing with a thud on the metal plate. Vasquez felt the snap of tendons in her ankle, the pain instantly excruciating. The structure shook violently.

Infected were pressed against the railing now, gaping at them, and the noise was drawing more in. Alex still had her head and shoulders out of the vent, and through tears of agony, Vasquez saw that she was waving at them to start descending. Lena was holding the controller, her hand hovering above the button. With surprising gentleness, James eased it out of her hand and pressed “Down”.

From above, agent Danvers-Luthor was now fully out of the hole, her butt resting on the sill and her legs braced against the building. Susan saw her clench her eyes shut, her mouth moving, and then she leapt. Time turned to treacle. For a second, it seemed like she’d over shot it, like she was going to miss altogether and plummet the rest of the way in free fall. Vasquez looked away.

The impact was loud, but not as loud as the screaming from the other survivors. Vasquez looked around uncertainly, to see her colleague being wrestled to the ground by her sobbing wife.

“Don't you ever scare me like that again! What were you thinking? Are you hurt?”

“Babe I'm fine! I don't know how I am but I'm fine!” The older woman laughed. Everyone joined in. Even Wallace managed to crack a smile.

The MEWP continued shuddering towards the ground, lit by the lights inside the building and the flickering glow of fires at street level. As Lena helped her lover to her feet, Alex looked over at Vasquez clutching her already swollen ankle, and her face fell. “What the fuck happened to you?” She asked simply.

Vasquez shrugged. “Men happened.” James looked embarrassed, and she laughed. “Don't worry, it's just a sprain.”

“We’ll get you out of this Susan, don't you worry.” Lena said reassuringly.

Vasquez laughed again, then gritted her teeth as another jolt of pain shot up her leg. “Hey, team work makes for dream work, right?”

The street as the MEWP finished its descent was deserted. A barrage of sound drifted across the air from where the barricades stood.  
Alex looked at her watch. “We’ve got to hurry this along guys, we’re down to t minus 12 minutes.

Carrying Vasquez between James and Alex, and now weaponless, the rag tag team hurried towards safety. As they neared the edge of the quarantine zone, the sound was deafening, and as they rounded the final corner, they saw why.

In front of the barricade was a crowd, lining the entire length of the wall made of over turned shipping crates, articulated lorries and hastily erected sheet metal fencing. The mob was 10 deep, stretching to 20 deep at least around the turrets where machine gunners had been placed to pick off any infected who tried to climb over. There was no way through.

“Give us a break!” Alex hissed.

“That building, if we can get to the first floor it practically over looks the wall. We can jump down, no problem.” James said, already moving towards the door, dragging Vasquez and, consequently Alex, with him.

“Where have I heard that before?” The injured woman chuckled.

From no mans land, a roaring like a jet plane taking off could be heard. Above the heads of the army of dead, they could see a dark oblong shape gradually rising skywards. It was about the size of a cart horse, and blue electric light fizzled and crackled from the underside. Alex blanched. “Victoria,” she uttered in horrified awe. “Let's move! Move! Times running out!”

Through a side door hanging on its hinges they dragged Vasquez, Lena hustling the other survivors through before ducking inside herself. The interior was dark as they hurdled up the stairs as fast as they could given their injured party, bursting out through a fire door onto the first floor of a shabby looking apartment building. As they hurtled passed, the noise of bodies slamming into front doors followed them.

At the far end of the corridor was a window. Amy rushed ahead and pushed it open, the pane hitting the outside wall. She began waving frantically at the soldiers below, who came running with their guns raised. “We’re not infected! We’re alive! Don’t shoot!” She repeated over and over. As the others reached the window, there was nothing they could do but join in. From the crowd below, a dozen zombies looked up at the voices, and turned to run back down the street.

The soldiers looked confused, and for a second Alex thought they were going to shoot. How typical would that be, she thought, waving stupidly at the armed men below, to get to within 10 feet of safety only to get shot by a scared 18 year old with a gun too big for him?

Another figure strode up, shouting something that

they couldn't hear over the din; the guns were lowered, and the men began frantically gesturing for them to jump.

“Lucy!” Alex breathed, smiling briefly, before turning to Vasquez. “I'm not going to lie to you Vasquez, this is going to hurt.”

Vasquez was pale, the nausea making her sweat now with the pain, but she managed a weak smile. “Is it going to hurt more than getting eaten alive by rabid freaks? No? Let's go, then.” And with that she pulled herself onto the window sill, and jumped. Before she had even landed, the sound of footsteps on the stairs could be heard below them, and Alex shoved Amy and Haifa forward. They jumped together, landing in a crumpled heap before being dragged out of the drop zone. Sue followed, squeezing Lena’s shoulder as she passed.

“Can you take him?” Alex asked James abruptly. He nodded, grabbing the doctor by the collar and dragging him through the window before he could complain. The lack of co-operation from the older man caused them to list to one side, missing the razor sharp edge of the sheet metal section of the barricade by millimetres and landing badly.

The door at the end of the corridor slammed open, the sound of pounding feet making Lena wince. Alex helped her up onto the very edge of the window, and gave her hand a squeeze. Bloody outstretched fingertips brushed Lena’s blouse, and without another moment of hesitation, the two women leapt into the night.


	11. Chapter 11

The noises running through the house were casual Sunday sounds, the kind that seek to define the peace rather than break it: the snuffling from the baby monitor, someone a few houses away mowing the lawn, the low beeping of the security system that showed it was activated. Alex lay on her back on the marital bed, in baggy shorts and a still damp sports bra, scrolling absently through social media on her phone. Next to her, Lena was lying on her arm, hugging the attached hand to her chest, and snoring softly.

It was moments like this, with the kids napping quietly across the hall and her wife's back pressed warmly into her side, that Alex struggled to believe the plague had ever happened. 12 months had passed since the day she'd jumped out of a first floor window with Lena, flying over the heads of a hoard of angry infected, while above them the deadliest weapon that she'd ever had the misfortune to witness in action began indiscriminately firing.

They'd landed surprisingly lightly, and after a moment to check for damage, Alex had held the other woman tighter than she had ever done before. They hadn't been sure whether to laugh or cry, so they’d opted to do both, laughing in disbelief that they'd made it and crying the tears they'd held back during the day, sprawled in the dirt together while the sky lit up with electric blue flashes and the hammering on the barricade slowly died down to nothing.

The other members of their group hadn't been so lucky. Haifa had broken a leg, Amy was knocked unconscious, Sue’s wrists had to have pins put in them in the end. James and Wallace had come off the worst, clashing together as they hit the ground, Wallace’s back had been damaged so badly that they thought he might be permanently paralysed (he wasn't) and James’s skull had been fractured from crown to right earlobe. But they were all alive. Some how, they'd walked through hell, and come out the other side. 12 months on, and the physical scars had mostly healed. The mental scars though, they were a bit more tricksy.

They'd been kept in confinement for 3 weeks after Red Tuesday, as the day of the disease had come to be known, disallowed to see anyone who wasn't in a hazmat suit. It should have been 3 months, but between J’onn, Lucy and Supergirl, they'd managed to pull enough of the right strings to have them released early. Walking out of the facility with Lena on her arm, and seeing her sister, mother and babies, alive and healthy, was the happiest moment of Alex's life. But when the hugs and tears and laughter had finished, and the survivors had kissed each other goodbye, the full enormity of what they'd been through had settled in. That night, and many nights since, neither woman had slept. They'd brought the children in with them and locked the door, but every noise sounded like the clicking of the cannibals, like footsteps coming for them.

It had gotten significantly worse for Lena when it became public knowledge that Dr. Wallace Woolf, the man they'd abandoned Lindsey for, that Lena had chosen over her other friends and that they'd all nearly died for, was a fraud. Wallace didn't have a cure. He hadn't even been able to make the virus himself, all he’d done was stumble on old research that had been mothballed because even Lex Luthor thought it was insane. Dr Woolf, it turned out, had spent his entire career sat quietly in a lab developing flu vaccines, not getting enough social interaction or fresh air.

The trial had been a short one, given that at every opportunity the man proudly confessed his guilt as if expecting acclaim for the deaths he’d caused. Nearly 5000 people, aliens and human, had died by the time the last body fell. The media hadn't shied away this time from declaring the incident an act of terror, and calling for capital punishment for the man responsible; what had been surprising was the support L Corp, and Lena herself received, in the aftermath. The papers had painted her as a plucky heroine, risking her life to save those of her small band of survivors, and the public, by and large, had lapped the narrative up.

The Danvers-Luthor family had watched the judgement from a nearby school gymnasium, that had been given over to allow the survivors and families of the dead to watch justice being done. There were too many people to fit in the hall, so they’d taken over the school playing field and occupied the large park down the road, and still there were people being turned away. When Wallace was sentenced, standing smugly in the box in a poorly fitting navy suit and red kipper tie, Lena had been holding her wife's hand so hard that it went white, crammed onto uncomfortable metal fold away chairs, with Lindsey’s husband and son sat right there with them. Kara and Eliza had watched from Midvale, after finally that morning taking the gun that Eliza still had barely a clue how to use back to the shop; it seemed somehow a fitting tribute to the closure they all hoped was coming.

He’d gotten life imprisonment, and the ensuing riot had lasted 2 days, only quieting when it became apparent that Wallace was in fact not going to see the life sentence carried out; on the drive from the court house to the maximum security prison, the entire armoured vehicle, drivers, prisoners and all, had vanished into thin air. The drivers had turned up a few hours later, stunned and confused but otherwise unhurt. There was no sign of the doctor, however. Not until a few days later, when a hand had been found washed up on the beach. Months later, the NCPD had collected enough of Wallace Woolf to make an almost complete corpse. The unfortunate thing for Dr Woolf was that forensics had established, on inspection, that it appeared nearly every piece apart from the vital organs had been removed from a live human body. A body that was struggling as they were sawn off. Alex had considered that that was just about right, all things considered.

As time went on, Lena had opened a temporary office outside of the now derelict down town area, calling on staff from across the world wide branches to come and help keep L Corp ticking over. From the roof of the new building, you could see the clearance of the epicentre of the virus, and latterly the deconstruction of 6 city blocks of ghost town architecture. Alex was looking forward to when the demolition was finished and construction on the public memorial park began; it was going to be a vast sprawling green space, with fountains, flower beds, playgrounds and sports facilities, because, as the mayor had said in her speech, “what better way to honour the dead than for the living to live a good life, side by side, as a community”. The DEO agent couldn't disagree.

In the same spirit, Lena had taken to devoting a lot of her free time to the charity projects she’d set up to support The Family. That was what the survivors and victims’ actual families were calling themselves, despite there being enough of them to populate a small town. Lena, with the help of Haifa, Amy and Sue, had arranged permanent accommodation to be made available for people who had lost everything, therapy on tap for anyone affected, educational programmes, sports clubs and social clubs and bands and choirs, as well as an entire social calendar of events ranging from concerts to cook outs. Alex and Vasquez had even started a soccer league for the small number of forces veterans who had made it out of the quarantine zone alive. The work had helped the women put their demons to bed almost as much as the counselling, and last month Lena had even agreed to let the children move back into their own room (as long as the baby monitor stayed on, and the various ‘security measures’ that made the lower floor a nightly death trap were engaged).

But here and now, it all felt very distant, with the dust motes dancing in the sunlight that filtered in through the curtains, her wife's gorgeous long hair tickling her ribs, and the sweat from a 10km run drying on Alex’s skin.

Lena stirred, rolling over to thread an arm over her wife’s abs and nuzzling her face into her armpit.

“Careful, I stink.” Alex twinkled at her.

Lena grumbled, pulling back enough to say sleepily, “I like your stink.”

“Weirdo.” Alex grinned, and Lena snorted.< /p>

“You knew what you were getting into when you married me.”

Alex hummed into the younger woman's hair, rolling over enough to pin her to the bed. Their lips met in a languid, soft kiss. “I know, what was I thinking?” She whispered, kissing down her wife's clavicle.

The brunette smirked in response, her breathing growing heavy as strong hands made their way under her pyjama top, tickling the soft skin of her stomach, and was about to answer when the baby monitor sprang to life.

“Moma!” Vera called, her voice thick with sleep and unshed tears.

Lena pressed their foreheads together, sighing happily. “Duty calls.” She extricated herself from under her wife, who flopped back onto the bed with her hands behind her head. “Don't think this ends here though.” The CEO wagged a cautionary finger from the doorway.

Alex inhaled contentedly, and let her eyes fall on the frame that hung on the opposite wall. It was a strange item to keep on display, just a square glass frame holding a little scrap of thick, textured linen. Alex smiled at it though, a wan smile. 

They'd gotten home a week after the trial, arms full of children and groceries, still worrying and glad to be home where they could lock the door. She'd hung back to take the girls’ coats off, and when she'd walked into the kitchen, Lena had been stood stock still, staring straight ahead. Alex followed her gaze and saw, perfectly in the centre of the kitchen island, a small blue box tied up with yellow ribbon. 

All hell had broken loose, of course. They'd evacuated and called the police; Kara had flown in dressed as Supergirl, freaking out even worse than Alex, and scanned the box with every sense she had. Eventually though they'd had to acknowledge that there didn't seem to be anything suspicious about the parcel, apart from its random appearance. Nevertheless, Lena had looked grim when she held it in her hands, tugging the ribbon open.

Inside was a hand written note that simply read: ‘You are my daughter. LL.’ Underneath the scrap of paper, neatly folded and stained with crispy dark brown patches, was a very familiar, crayon red, kipper neck tie. Lena often said that it was the best present her mother had ever given her. Alex couldn't disagree with that, either. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who bore with this to the bitter (fluffy) end, and everyone who commented and Kudos'd - peace out.


End file.
